Hanselman recently posted about the "upper limit" of the number of projects in VS 2005. It's a good post because it's true that too many projects just bog down Visual Studio. Consider refactoring your VS .Net solution to decrease the number of projects if you're having performance problems.

I'm currently working with a VS 2003 project where there are 26 projects. We really don't need 26 projects. But for right now, the size is borderline unmanageable. VS 2003 crashes often and it takes a long time for the solution to load.

What makes matters worse (as Hanselman also notes) is the JetBrains ReSharper add-in. ReSharper by itself is an awesome tool, but not so much with very large VS 2003/2005 solutions. ReSharper constantly searches your projects as you type and perform tasks in Visual Studio, so the more projects you have the slower it goes.

Still even worse is that ReSharper will re-enable itself if you disable it as an add-in. Normally in Visual Studio, you can press the Ctrl+Space keyboard combination to enable Intellisense/auto-complete. This key combination will enable ReSharper if it is disabled. This is at least true for VS 2003.

I've resorted to completely uninstalling ReSharper for VS 2003 from my system. I use the Ctrl+Space combo pretty often by habit, and I don't want ReSharper enabled. My only option was to completely get rid of it until I move on to another project.

In the meantime, my team will look in to shrinking the number of projects in our solution to make it more manageable. Then we'll reap the benefits of a leaner solution and add-ins like ReSharper.