Visual Studio 2013 > New project > unspecified error (exception from hresult: 0x80004005 (e_fail))

Thanks for all the replies and suggestions. On the PC I'm using, the Documents directory and it's contents are encrypted by default - including my IISExpress. Removing the encryption solved the problem.

Have you tried to manually install NuGet for VS 2013?

I had a similar issue, until I found that the VS 2013 setup - for some reason - did not install the NuGet package manager. After I installed it manually everything worked fine.

I'm running on Win 8.1 Pro (64 bits) with Visual Studio Express for web 2013

The were two problems in my machine, namely :

• the applicationhost.config file in C:\Users(insert your user log in name)\Documents\IISExpress\config was not well formed. It seems this problem occurs because the .NET configuration system reads the applicationHost.config file without locking it. If the IIS configuration file is being written to while it is being read by the Windows Activation Service (WAS), that file may be corrupted. Anyhow, I binged around and downloaded a pristine copy of it.

• After fixing the above problem, I subsequently encountered the same error message (unspecified error - exception from hresult: 0x80004005 (e_fail) ). I then tried to create an MVC web project via another way. I created a blank solution and added an MVC web project to it and this time the IDE spewed out a different message. The pop-up window dumped a cryptic line like so, "IIS could not read C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Config\web.config - error". I proceeded to uninstall IIS 8.0 and re-installed the application. And voila, I can now create MVC web apps again! :)