'exception has been thrown by a target of invocation' when starting up Visual Studio 2010

It seems the problem was that my system path became too long for Windows to handle: it was 2087 characters long (hat tip to this article).

I had this issue with Visual Studio 2012 today. Something seemed to be gone wrong during the first setup, so it helped to delete these registry entries:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0_Config

Visual Studio will then setup again when you start it. You can also just rename it.

I had the same problem with Visual Studio 2012 and SQL Server Management Studio, solution was to reduce the SYSTEM PATH variable length.

Symptoms: After one instance of Visual Studio 2012 was started, any other attempt to start another or one of SQL Server Management Studio would fail. The computer reboot would allow me to start again a single instance of VS2012. Repairing the VS2012 installation didn't help.