How to fix visual studio error “cannot find one or more components .Please re-install the application” in windows 8.1?

Question

As Alex suggests find devenv.exe and run it . when search for devenv.exe then I found it\'s there . When I run this file getting error \"cannot

Answer 1

well, it seems simple but it work like magic

input visual studio in your windows search bar then right click on the visual studio app and choose run as administrator

all things been equal, it should run without an itch

Answer 2

Problem is with security setting . After 2-3 hours of Googling i found many solution but none of them work then i tried these solutions .

There is one  folder in your machine:  "C:\ProgramData". 
Don't worry if you don't see this folder, unhide all the folders, you will find it there.
I did not had the rights on "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\VisualStudio" .
See if you have full rights on the same.
If your are not able to open this folder, This means that you do not have rights on this.
to give rights follow the steps below :
1) Right click on the folder "VisualStudio."
2) Go to Properties->Security. See if your PC name is there in the user names list, 
if not , then add it.
3) Go to Advanced -> Owner -> Edit -> Other users or groups.  add your PC name,
i.e add yourself as the owner of the folder and give full rights.

Which is found here Application-data-folder-error . I was unable to change security of ProgramData files then i tried this solution .

1. On the root folder, right click, select properties, select security tab.
2. Click Advanced
3. The window that pops up should show the current owner. Click "Change." 
The "Select User or Group" pop up box appears. 
4. In the text box, type in your current user name (you should be an admin), and hit the 
"Check Names" button. Your name will be replaced with the "official" system 
 name (i.e.,preceded by computer name and back slash).
5. Click OK
6. The box disappears, sending you back to the Advanced Security Settings window.
7. A new tick box appears below owner, with the text "Replace owner on subcontainers and 
objects" Select this tick box.
8. I also selected the tick box "Replace all child object permission entries
with inheritable permission entries from this object", but I think I had to run this twice
- once with this box ticked and once without.
9. Make sure that "everyone" appears on the Permission entries window, if not,
click add. The same box that appears in step 4 shows up again. 
Type everyone, click "Check Names" and then "OK"
10. Hit apply

which is found here Permission error.

Finally it works cheers :) Hope it will help to some other .

Answer 3

One possible user friendly workaround is to use the take ownership method from How to Geek and use it on %USERPROFILE%\AppData and on C:\ProgramData where C is the disk partition holding your OS. However you'll need to make hidden folders visible first. Then navigate to your VS installation folder and run devenv /resetuserdata.

Answer 4

Running cd C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE devenv /resetuserdata using the command prompt works fine. The only thing which everyone has missed is that you will have to reboot your PC after running the above command. I was having same error after running the command several times but was fixed after I rebooted my machine. And of course for VS 2015 replace Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0 with Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0

Answer 5

I have come across this problem while installing VS 2015 community. For me the problem was that I had ThreatFire running, which prevented VS from loading some dll. Deinstalling ThreatFire was the only solution. You cannot just stop it, as the actual service will still continue to run.

In general, thats how I figured out what the problem is:

1. Download and extract Windows Process Monitor https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb896645.aspx

2. Run Process Monitor, include Process devenv.exe to the filters, exlcude Result SUCCESS, and click ok.

3. Process Monitor will display a huge list of file and registry accesses. Go through the list and look for events with Result ACCESS DENIED or FILE/PATH NOT FOUND. (You can filter the list even more using right click context menu)

4. That should give you usefull hints about what is really going wrong as the VS error message really is no help at all. You can also view the stack trace that generated the event. Thats how I found out about ThreatFire blocking dll loading.

Answer 6

For users experiencing this issue who has tried all the above answers, this is what worked for me for Visual Studio 2015:

• After uninstalling/reinstalling Visual Studio 2015, if you're still experencing the "Cannot find one or more components" error, open up Add or Remove Programs from the Windows search bar.

• Uninstall any redistributables from 2015 and 2017 if applicable.

• If you happen to have the offline install folder for Visual Studio 2015 - navigate to the "packages/vcRedistD14" folder and install both the 32 bit and 64 bit redistributable packages. Otherwise, download them from the MS website.

• Attempt to open Visual Studio 2015, it should be working normally now.

I haven't attempted to reinstall the 2017 redist packages, but for the purposes of getting 2015 working again, this is what worked for me. Another option if you already have them installed, is to simply Repair the redist packages.