Whenever I use Visual Studio 2005 with an external USB drive added or removed, such as when I undock the laptop, or forget to turn on one of the drives, Visual Studio spends numerous minutes re-evaluating my hardware setup when it is openned.
I believe that help is installed locally, and it may even by on one of the USB drives (because of space problems on the main drive). Is there some way to stop the IDE from wasting my time
Help system reconfigures when USB drives are added/removed
Derek36080
Unfortunately, if you've installed the help to a removable drive, this may indeed be the cause, and not easily solvable aside from reinstalling to a fixed drive.
Presumably, what's happening is that your help content is registered to a drive path that may be going in and out of existence, and so the help system tries to resolve that and update its state whenever that happens.