Vsprecleanvsexe Visual Studio 2012 Exclusive ^hot^

There is no official or widely documented tool named vsprecleanvs.exe vspreclean.exe specific to Visual Studio 2012. It is highly likely that this term refers to the Visual Studio Uninstaller (sometimes associated with vs_uninstall.exe vs_preclean

Visual Studio 2012 introduced the VSPerf (Visual Studio Performance) toolset, located typically in: vsprecleanvsexe visual studio 2012 exclusive

It looks like you’re asking for an analysis of a specific error or file naming pattern — vsprecleanvsexe visual studio 2012 exclusive — which isn’t a standard Microsoft term. Based on the keywords, this appears to relate to Visual Studio 2012, possibly involving pre-clean build events, VS (Visual Studio) executable conflicts, and exclusive access problems during builds. There is no official or widely documented tool

Further References

, or have you made the jump to a newer IDE? Let me know in the comments! Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 Update 4 , or have you made the jump to a newer IDE

Common Scenarios

1. Locked Intermediate Files

During a failed or cancelled build, files like .obj, .pdb, or .tlog remain locked by a lingering mspdbsrv.exe or cl.exe. When you run a clean build, the pre-clean step fails with “exclusive access denied”.

This is the most common fix. Even if your user account is an admin, right-click your vs_setup.exe (or the ISO equivalent) and select Run as Administrator. This gives vsprecleanvs.exe the elevated permissions it needs to modify system folders. 2. Manual Process Termination

Important Behavior

vsprefixcleanup.exe does not stop the profiler. It does not kill processes. It only cleans environment variables for the current process and any future children spawned after cleanup.

Key Functions:

  1. Configuration Cleanup: It removes non-standard solution configurations (often the source of "exclusive" lock errors).
  2. Build Stability: Helps resolve issues where a build fails because Visual Studio 2012 thinks a file or configuration is in use by another process.
  3. Migration Aid: Useful when migrating older solutions (like VS 2010) into the VS 2012 environment without carrying over corrupt configuration data.