Recently I had Visual Studio freezing every time I opened some project. A coworker had it crash. After some digging I thought of disabling VS  start-up Add-In.

There are so many of them, as you can see in the registry at:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Packages

Anyway, there is no easy way to enable / disable them on an individual basis, but you could just disable them all.

Go to the Tools menu then Options:

Then go to Environment / Add-In and uncheck "Allow Add-in components to load"

To be honest I have no clue what are all the add-in so disabled, but I haven't noticed any missing feature.
On the other hand I did notice big improvements, such as much faster VS startup and no slow or crashing start-up.

Later I discover another “trick” to reset Visual Studio to an almost pristine state. It’s not uninstall/reinstall which not only tool a lot of time but leave all the plugin/add-ons/etc… in place.

It’s resetting VS settings. Just in case you better save your settings before resetting them as well!

Here are the steps:

Tools => Import and Export Settings…

And then Reset All Settings

And voila!