I got this annoying error, every time I tried to run my VS2008 SP1 in Administrator mode (which is needed to avoid the “Failed to map the path '/'.” when running an EPiServer site in visual studios web server). Some google searches brought to outdated microsoft material – but luckily also to Alex Riley’s helpful post: https://www.21concepts.com/Blog/EntryId/10/Visual-Studio-2005-2008-The-application-cannot-start.aspx.
On my win7 x64, it turned out (thanks procmon) that my visual studio was looking for C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\dte80a.olb – and once I copied that from C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\microsoft shared\MSEnv all was well.
