title: Attempting to open Xamarin layout designer freezes Visual Studio with no errors
body: <p>Before I get into the question: I am using visual studio 2015 Community with Xamarin. I have tried the following to rectify this problem:    </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Complete VS uninstall and reinstall (along with all components of Xamarin and Android SDK.)  </li>
  <li>Rolled back various updates to Xamarin (including the most recent one)   </li>
  <li>Ran repair install on visual studio, c++ 2015 redists (x86, and x64)  </li>
  <li>Scoured Xamarin forums and Xamarin bugzilla for similar issues. While I found some that dealt with similar issues with the designer. None of them described the exact problem I'm having.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p><strong>Ok, now that's out of the way, here's my issue:</strong></p>
  
  <p>I was happily working my way through a tutorial on Xamarin.android and things were going great. I was also concurrently building my own simple app to practice my new skill and make it meaningful.</p>
  
  <p>Somewhere along the line either the Android SDK manager or the Xamarin updater wanted me to update something so I went ahead and did it. This started giving me some strange behavior, plus my VS Community install hasn't seen much maintenance lately, so I decided to do a full wipe and reinstall. This took quite a long time between Visual Studio and all the Xamarin and Android tools and updates.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Once I was done I started working again, however any time I try to open a layout (.axml) file in the designer, visual studio totally freezes. If I'm fast I can click to the code interface, but it still locks up. 
  I can add new layouts to the solution, but the project won't see them (they exist in the folder however, and can be opened with notepad++) if I include them, and then try to open them, the same thing happens. 
  By 'freezes', I can't click anything in VS, even to close the window, I have to force close it from task manager. This is also strange as task manager doesn't show the program as locked up, only using a minimal amount of ram and cpu (as if it was idling normally).</strong></p>
  
  <p>If I let it sit locked up long enough, Windows will prompt me to run VS from a devenv (not exactly sure what this means). When I do this and reproduce the problem (attempt to open a layout file) I get a long log of unintelligible errors. The only hints I found were some references to missing c++ libraries, which doesn't add up as I have run the repair tool for my redistributables several times now.</p>
  
  <p>Has anyone encountered this problem before? And if so how should I fix it? It this totally prevents me from doing anything with Xamarin and is a big turn-off to the product. (this isn't the first breaking bug I've encountered)</p>
  
  <p>Here is all my version info:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2015 Version 14.0.25431.01 Update 3
    Microsoft .NET Framework Version 4.6.01038</p>
    
    <p>Installed Version: Community</p>
    
    <p>Visual Basic 2015   00322-20000-00000-AA850 Microsoft Visual Basic
    2015</p>
    
    <p>Visual C# 2015   00322-20000-00000-AA850 Microsoft Visual C# 2015</p>
    
    <p>Visual C++ 2015   00322-20000-00000-AA850 Microsoft Visual C++ 2015</p>
    
    <p>Windows Phone SDK 8.0 - ENU   00322-20000-00000-AA850 Windows Phone
    SDK 8.0 - ENU</p>
    
    <p>Add New File   3.5 The fastest and easiest way to add new files to any
    project - including files that start with a dot</p>
    
    <p>ASP.NET and Web Tools 2015.1 (Beta8)   14.1.11107.0 ASP.NET and Web
    Tools 2015.1 (Beta8)</p>
    
    <p>ASP.NET Web Frameworks and Tools 2012.2   4.1.41102.0 For additional
    information, visit </p>
    
    <p>ASP.NET Web Frameworks and Tools 2013   5.2.40314.0 For additional
    information, visit</p>
    
    <p>Common Azure Tools   1.8 Provides common services for use by Azure
    Mobile Services and Microsoft Azure Tools.</p>
    
    <p>Dummy Text Generator   1.2.12 Easily insert dummy text into the editor
    in Visual Studio. Lorem Ipsum and other vocabularies are supported.</p>
    
    <p>GitHub.VisualStudio   1.0 A Visual Studio Extension that brings the
    GitHub Flow into Visual Studio.</p>
    
    <p>JavaScript Language Service   2.0 JavaScript Language Service</p>
    
    <p>JavaScript Project System   2.0 JavaScript Project System</p>
    
    <p>Microsoft Azure Mobile Services Tools   1.4 Microsoft Azure Mobile
    Services Tools</p>
    
    <p>NuGet Package Manager   3.4.4 NuGet Package Manager in Visual Studio.
    For more information about NuGet, visit</p>
    
    <p>Open Command Line   2.1.177 Opens a command line at the root of the
    project. Support for all consoles such as CMD, PowerShell, Bash etc.
    Provides syntax highlighting, Intellisense and execution of .cmd and
    .bat files.</p>
    
    <p>PreEmptive Analytics Visualizer   1.2 Microsoft Visual Studio
    extension to visualize aggregated summaries from the PreEmptive
    Analytics product.</p>
    
    <p>SQL Server Compact &amp; SQLite Toolbox   4.6.0 SQL Server Compact &amp;
    SQLite Toolbox adds scripting, import, export, rename, query execution
    and much more to SQL Server Compact &amp; SQLite Data Connections.</p>
    
    <p>SQL Server Data Tools   14.0.60519.0 Microsoft SQL Server Data Tools</p>
    
    <p>TypeScript   1.8.36.0 TypeScript tools for Visual Studio</p>
    
    <p>Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova   Update 10 Visual Studio Tools
    for Apache Cordova</p>
    
    <p>Web Compiler   1.11.319 Compiler for LESS, Sass and CoffeeScript files</p>
    
    <p>Web Essentials 2015.3   3.0.235 Adds many useful features to Visual
    Studio for web developers. Requires Visual Studio 2015</p>
    
    <p>Xamarin   4.1.2.18 (fcbe082) Visual Studio extension to enable
    development for Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android.</p>
    
    <p>Xamarin.Android   6.1.2.21 (1cf254d) Visual Studio extension to enable
    development for "Xamarin.Android".</p>
    
    <p>Xamarin.iOS   9.8.2.22 (f37444a) Visual Studio extension to enable
    development for Xamarin.iOS.</p>
  </blockquote>