You just clicked publish in Visual Studio and you can't do anything else. It appears that the program is frozen and you already tried to update all the plugins, turn features on/off, and restart your computer.

What is actually happening here is that the publish dialog is appearing, it is just appearing off screen. If you installed Visual Studio while you had multiple monitors setup or  your last publish was with multiple monitors then the dialog will appear off screen. The next thing you need to do is plug in an external monitor and try and publish the site again. This time you will see the dialog appear on the second monitor. You can just move it back to your primary monitor by dragging the window over. After that, you can unplug your second monitor and publish as normal moving forward.

I spent awhile trying to troubleshoot this and luckily I found a blog out there addressing the problem. Hopefully it helps you out!

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About the Author:

Arra Derderian serves as the President and as a Lead Technical Architect for Cloud Construct. As a founder at Cloud Construct, Arra is involved in all levels of the business from new project engagements, project planning, and development.

He also serves as the founder of the Boston Orchard CMS User Group and is a member of the Windows Azure Insiders group.

Arra graduated from Northeastern University School with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science.