Visual Studio 2015 diagnostic tools no longer working

Full disclosure: I work at Microsoft, specifically on the Diagnostic Tools team.

There are parts of the Diagnostic Tools that won't work on Windows 7, specifically taking a CPU profiling trace while debugging. This is a limitation of the operating system and ETW. If you are just interested in the graphs and debugging events, those should work. You can turn on logging for our tools which might give you some insight into why they are not working:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\DiagnosticsHub\LogLevel  
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\DiagnosticsHub\LogDirectory

For LogLevel you can use one of the following strings "All", "Info", "Debug", "Warning", "Error" (In your case I would use All to better see what is happening). As for LogDirectory it is a directory of your choice "C:\Logs". When your done reproing the scenario, close VS to flush the logs and don't forget to delete these keys as the diagnostic tools logging is pretty system intensive.

You should be able to search for "Error ---" in the logs to get an idea of what is happening. We have seen problems with certain VS extensions and custom projects.

Also, feel free to also post the issue at: https://connect.microsoft.com/ Each issue that is received there gets turned into a bug and assigned to the corresponding team.

Deleting my solution's .suo (solution options) file fixed the issue. My initial statement of this bug affecting even new projects seems to be wrong. Although, I did do a complete reinstall of VS after doing that test, so it's possible that impacted the outcome.