So, I finally got the release version of Visual Studio 2008 installed on my home box. And what do I get whenever I pretty much try to do anything within the IDE, including close it? This error:

"Visual Studio has encountered an unexpected error." I tried a repair install, but that didn't affect anything. I was getting ready to give up and go to bed, when I decided that even though it was a completely useless error maybe, just maybe, if I search for it in the context of Visual Studio 2008 I might get some kind of useable result. Well, as luck would have it I got this as my first result:

Seems innocuous enough, but in the post he said that he found it to be VisualSVN (don't let it fool you, VisualSVN rocks hard) that was causing the error. I just happened to have this installed, and now, it works perfectly. Thank you google and this post.