Adding COM reference crashes Visual Studio - How do I debug what's causing VS to crash?

Drakinite 26 Reputation points
2022-05-06T03:11:44.087+00:00

Hello,

When I add a COM reference to "MediaMonkey5 Library" (it's a music library software) in a .NET project, Visual Studio crashes. I'd like to figure out what's wrong with the program's COM configuration that's causing Visual Studio to crash.

To reproduce it:
0) install MediaMonkey v5.0+ (I'm not gonna link to its website because that might be considered advertising, but it's the first result if you google it.)

  1. in Visual Studio 2017 or 2019, create a new .NET project (WPF app or Windows Forms app, or possibly some other types)
  2. under References in the Solution Explorer, right click > Add Reference
  3. under COM, check MediaMonkey5 Library and click OK
  4. Visual Studio crashes

I don't know the first thing about debugging Visual Studio itself, and googling "debugging visual studio" simply gives results for how to use Visual Studio to debug programs you're developing. What can I do to figure out what's causing VS to crash? It's only the "MediaMonkey 5 Library" that's crashing VS, and it occurs on multiple people's computers, so I don't believe it's an issue with VS's configuration.

=== UPDATE ===

Found another post suggesting to search through Event Viewer and I've pasted all the details in the following text file: 199370-visualstudiocrasheventlog.txt

Shortened preview of first log (Error):

Application: devenv.exe  
Framework Version: v4.0.30319  
Description: The process was terminated due to an unhandled exception.  
Exception Info: System.AccessViolationException  
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.IVsReferenceManagerUser.ChangeReferences(UInt32, Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.IVsReferenceProviderContext)  
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.ReferenceManager.ReferenceManagerControl.Control_OnReferenceChanged(Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.__VSREFERENCECHANGEOPERATION, Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.IVsReferenceProviderContext)  
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.ReferenceManager.ReferenceManagerControl.ApplyChangeOperation(System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable`1<Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.IVsReferenceProviderContext>, Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.__VSREFERENCECHANGEOPERATION, Boolean, System.Collections.Generic.List`1<System.Exception> ByRef)  

Shortened preview of second log (Error):

Faulting application name: devenv.exe, version: 17.0.31903.59, time stamp: 0x6182abc9  
Faulting module name: OLEAUT32.dll, version: 10.0.19041.985, time stamp: 0x61567b6b  
Exception code: 0xc0000005  
Fault offset: 0x0000000000016c3e  

Shortened preview of third log (Information):

Fault bucket 1208009750557970256, type 4  
Event Name: APPCRASH  
Response: Not available  
Cab Id: 0  

I can also access the files that the third event is referencing. Which ones would be helpful in this case?

Visual Studio
Visual Studio
A family of Microsoft suites of integrated development tools for building applications for Windows, the web and mobile devices.
4,613 questions
C#
C#
An object-oriented and type-safe programming language that has its roots in the C family of languages and includes support for component-oriented programming.
10,260 questions
{count} votes