Can I selectively disable packages from loading into VS2010?

Question

Continuation question from: VS2010 loads slowly. Can I profile extensions' respective startup time?

After looking at the log file, it turns out there are a few packa

Answer 1

Do you have any ideas how to reduce their times?

There is a way to improve load times without disabling the packages. This is universal way of speeding up program load but you need to have an SSD.

1) Find out what folders are being hit most heavily during startup. ProcessMonitor from SysInternals can visualize it. In VS 2010 case these folders on my box were:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\Ide\ C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Extensions

2) Move this folders to SSD.

3) Create NTFS Junction from old folder location to the new one: mklink /J (mklink is not an .exe - it's a command build-in into cmd.exe)

Also you could try to disable packages from Tools/Extensions. But from my experience VS start up time improves only if you skip all extensions. IMHO it's studio extension engine that takes a lot of time to start and slows the studio startup, not the extensions.