Sometimes you just don’t want the add-in to run in Visual Studio. This tip, and dozens more, are available via Sara Ford.
Disable Add-ins on Start-Up by holding the Left-Shift key down
If you ever want to disable add-ins from starting on launch, you can hold down the Left-Shift key while VS is loading. If you find yourself running into random crashes, you might want to try disabling add-ins (either by this Left-Shift method or going to the Tools – Add-in Manager) to determine if it is a VS issue or an Add-in issue. You’ll still be able to manually restart your Add-in during this VS session.
If you are seeing random VS crashes and you have Add-ins installed, the Visual Studio Team on the MSDN Forums would love to know if disabling add-ins had any effect on the crashes.
I had a faulty toolbox addin (ActiveReports report designer) that cause startup crashes of VS2008SP1. Starting with shift or anything else I tried did not help. Uninstalling the report designer did.
I would be nice if Shift also skipped the custom toolbox items…