Hi Ed,

Thanks for sharing this problem.

The registration of the NCrunch menu is something controlled by VS itself in response to the existence of NCrunch's addin. If NCrunch is installed but the menu is not showing, this means that either the menu has been moved/disabled in the VS settings (unlikely), or the VS install state has some issues.

Try opening a command prompt with administrator privileges and running: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe /setup

.. Then wait until the devenv.exe process finishes its work and try reloading. Is the problem resolved?

Try the following:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe /rootsuffix test

This will create a fresh registry root for Visual Studio with default settings, under a special named context.

Is the NCrunch menu showing in this state?

Ok - this confirms that the problem is being caused by a corrupt VS registry hive. Unfortunately these sorts of things do happen in VS from time to time. They're rare, and they can be fixed, but they are a bit painful if you have a lot of customisation in your settings.

You have a couple of options from here. Either you can continue to work with VS using the new rootsuffix, loading it up always with the new parameter, or you can clear our the default registry hive and reset the VS settings.

I have been told that deleting the registry key at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0 (with VS shut down) can solve this problem. I would caution you to first back this up to make sure you have a fallback in case this doesn't work for you. I haven't personally tried this myself - so this is 2nd hand knowledge.

Note that working with a custom rootsuffix won't introduce any side-effects as far as I'm aware.