Visual Studio takes forever to start the first time

Solution 1:

If the loading is taking a long time, Alt+Tab to find a login page hidden underneath the "We're getting things ready" window. Enter your Microsoft account credentials.

This answer was originally posted by Alex K in a comment.

Solution 2:

I had already gone past the credentials screen.

I left mine running for a while but eventually killed the process and restarted VS.

It started instantly.

Solution 3:

I had no sign-on screen hiding behind the "We're Getting Things Ready". I ended the task in Windows Task Manager. Then I started Visual Studio again (no need to reboot). This time I noticed the option to "Sign In later". I selected this and it started up in just a couple of minutes. I then signed in after it started up. All seems to be working fine now.

Solution 4:

I too experienced this odd first time start up 'hang' on a fresh install to a new PC. For what it's worth, my experience mirrored bassbytesbikes. I finally just killed and restarted it. No discernible ill effect... so far.

Solution 5:

I came across this problem installing Visual Studio Premium 2013 in a VirtualBox VM. Specifically, I'd enter my login credentials and then it would hang on the 'Preparing for first time use' screen. If I killed VS and then restarted it, it'd bring up the main window but then hang before it displayed the startup page.

The solution for me was to enable 3D graphics acceleration in the VM settings. This seems to be because IE relies on 3D graphics and VS uses IE to display the start page (among other things).