Disabling Intellisense

Microsoft doesn’t provide any way to disable Intellisense. This wouldn’t be a problem, except Intellisense can and does crash.

To disable Intellisense, close Visual Studio and navigate to your vcpackages folder:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\vcpackages

Rename the file feacp.dll to something like foulup.dll. Now Visual Studio won’t be able to load Intellisense, but rather than crash it will just quietly drop its features.

Now, if you miss Intellisense, take a look at Whole Tomato Software. I’m not affiliated with these guys, but I used their product and found it amazingly useful. It isn’t a complete replacement for Intellisense, but it does offer some of the same features without the crashing.

Update: Visual Studio 2005 SP1 seems to have fixed the crashing issues for me. But this remains the best way I know to completely disable Intellisense.