Intellisense parsing brings my 12 core (24, hyperthreaded), 32GB machine to its knees every time I open a Visual Studio (2008, SP1) solution (which is quite often because VS crashes frequently) - for about 15-20 minutes (sometimes longer) - and intermittently thereafter.
I use Visual Assist (although that is not he cause - same issue if VA is disabled) so I don't even need Intellisense. I'd like to disable it but the methods I have found (adding macros and deleting feacp.dll don't seem to work for me. When disabling via the macros, for example, it reports that Intellisense is disable, but when I restart VS and open the solution again it still goes into its "Updating Intellisense" holding pattern).
I could be imagining it but I believe this has started becoming a problem since moving to 64-bit Windows XP (that is, Intellisense wasn't such a bottleneck that I even tried disabling it before - so I don't know if the techniques worked or not).
Anyone been down this route and found a solution (if you pardon the pun)?
The solution has a lot of C++ projects, with a handful of C# and C++/CLI projects too.
I posted a link to this question on the accu-general mailing list and Gennaro Prota responded, asking if I'd seen the approach in the following:
http://forums.wholetomato.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=8464
In summary this involves setting a(n otherwise undocumented) registry variable that VA picks up and causes it to disable the VS Intellisense for you.
This one worked for me (after a reboot). I'm still not sure why that other approaches didn't work, but I'm happy now, so I thought I'd pass on that suggestion here (as Gennaro doesn't use Stackoverflow).