Cannot find one or more components. Please reinstall the application

Question

I am getting this error in Windows Server 2012 with Visual Studio 2012 installed trying to open SQL Server Management Studio 2012:

Cannot find one or more components. Please reinstall the application

I tried many things, including installing SQL Server Management Studio 2014, uninstalling, reinstalling… Then repairing VS2012, installing SSMS 2014 again. All to no avail.

Answer 1

Uninstall the Visual Studio 2010 Shell, this was done by downloading the installer.

Once downloaded, run the installer and remove the VS2010 Shell component. Once done, run the SQL 2014 Management Studio installer or do a repair on your existing installation, this will itself reinstall the VS2010 Shell components.

Then it opened for me.

In Order To Repair Sql Server Management Studio Do Below Steps -

1. Open Control Panel Then Click on Program and Features
2. Then Find Microsoft Sql Server 2012 , Right click on it and choose uninstall
3. Then uninstall wizard will open and Follow the wizard steps to uninstall it.

Answer 2

In my case, this error started happening after a large number of Windows security updates were installed, and only occurred when I tried to open SSMS by using a runas command with the /noprofile switch. This had been working fine previously, but after the patching, the presence of the /noprofile switch caused this error to come up when opening SSMS 2014.

I also wasn't able to open Visual Studio 2010 using a runas /noprofile command either, which also had been working previously.

To resolve the issue, I did the following:

In a regular command prompt:

    Runas /user:xxx\yyyyy cmd

(where xxx\yyyy is the account that I am trying to run SSMS and VS as.)

In the new command prompt:

    C:
    cd\
    cd program files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE
    devenv /resetuserdata

After this, all my settings for Visual Studio were gone, but otherwise I was able to open both Visual Studio 2010 and SSMS 2014.