Hallo,

It's useless to add just another complaint to thousands already out there, concering the MSHelp2 system. It's been widely discussed that it's unacceptable for vendors to take responsibility of the dissadvantages of the help system, when our installers need 20 secs to deploy components and up to an hour(!) to merge help index. The writer is a Microsoft fan, which gives me the right to say that honestly, MSHelp2 is the worse technology ever delevoped by Microsoft! But this is not the issue here.

VS2008 is out. We've been using it from day one. Though we all hoped that MSHelp2 would improve through time, things actually got worse. VS2008 is new and came earlier than expected (actually earlier that we are used to. Coz Nov. 2007 for a product called 2008, is perfect if not late). As a result, it crushes often. Everytime I open it again, when I try to access help (any window; Dynamic Help, Contents etc.), I get the famous "Help is updating to reflect recent changes" dialog, even though thereare no changes tohelp collections. The "this might lastsome minutes" statement of course does not clarify that these can even be100mins! So production goes back waiting for this to finish, and it always lasts for ages. Much more than it did in VS2005 although it was a problem then too (when it occured. Not as often as now). During the process, CPU is up to 90% (Pentium 4 3Ghz/2Gb RAM. Not the best but normal.Much better than what's required. And it's just an example. Can be a few minutes faster on another system. It's still a serious problem.), therefore you can do nothing but wait. I live with the constant fear that next time I'll click a help window or hit F1, thishatefuldialog will appear! Killing the process through Task Manager, though tempting,is no solution of course. Sooner or later you'll need to go through this or you have no Help. So the questions are:

1. Why does the Help system update again and again (not only after a crush of VS), since there were no changes to help collections?
2. Since the problem is there now, is there any way (setting, registry key, anything), to tell MSHelp2 not to perform this automatically? So that I can do this manually only when I know there have been changes to help collections.

Some conclusions of my own:

• Occasionally, though integrated help viewer inside VS demands update, the Combined Collection opens in the Document Explorer normally. Since Document Explorer is not run as administrator, I tried running VS2008 as a normal user as well. Voila! Help does not ask for update. So my conclusion is thatthis has something to do with UAC. It's possible that during update, the help system tries to write files or reg keys it doesn't manage to, so next time it thinks it still needs update. Though this stilldoes not explain why would an update that started from within VS, thus run as adminitrator, did not manage to update everything needed to be updated, so it doesn't ask this again. Nor does it explain why this happens in random times, or after VS crushes. In addition, there are only few occassions when Document Explorer doesn't demand update while integrated help does. Most of the times, both do.

Thank You.

Anand..

Try this...

Kill the devenv.exe and dexplore.exe processes and then run dexplore.exe on it's own.

Usually, dexplore.exe is in: C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Help 9\dexplore.exe

When you rundexplore.exe on it's own, itshows the "Help Update In Progress" dialog for a short while and then it completes. Now whenyou press F1 in VS, it should open the help file just fine.

It worked for me..