I was getting this error today when trying to use the designer view of a Windows Form with the visio active x control. I would imagine this same error could occur for any COM call.
Warning 45 Unspecified error (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80004005 (E_FAIL))
Or you may see an error like -
Error HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call to a COM component
This could be a DLL error in some cases, but in this case, it was a conflict with an extension or extension framework for Visual Studio. After disabling the ‘Productivity Power Tools’ extension and restarting VS, the problem disappeared.
It’s confusing because there was no problem in the last several weeks I have been working with this. I had already tried cleaning the solution and restarting the computer but it had no effect. After it started working again, I re-enabled the ‘Productivity Power Tools’ extension to try and recreate the issue, but was unsuccessful.
At this point I cannot say exactly what caused it, but disabling extensions is a good starting point to troubleshooting VS issues.
