Fixing missing or failing Performance Explorer in Visual Studio 2005

If you are using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and would like to use the Performance Explorer that is part of the Team Editions (Team Edition for Software Architects or Team Suite), you can open the Explorer by choosing the View/Other Windows/Performance Explorer menu command. However, sometimes this menu command goes missing (disappears altogether) or choosing it gives you an error message or simply does nothing. If this is the case, you have a problem!

Now, how would you fix this situation? The best bet is to try to close Visual Studio, and open the Visual Studio command prompt from the Start menu. From here, you can start the development environment (DevEnv.exe) with a special command-line parameter called /ResetSkipPkgs, which clears the list of badly behaving packages. You see, sometimes Performance Explorer can cause trouble, and thus Visual Studio black-lists it. Using this parameter when starting Visual Studio gets is up and running again. Thanks for AH for the tip!