I ran into this problem this morning. When opening a solution within Visual Studio the application would process each of the projects and then exit abruptly. The application simply closed without any error dialog or feedback as to any problem that had occurred.

I checked the event log and found the following .NET runtime error in the application log:
.NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.3603 - Fatal Execution Engine Error (7A036050) (80131506)

Fortunately a quick search on google led me to this page:
http://michaelsync.net/2009/10/31/net-runtime-version-2-0-50727-3603-fatal-execution-engine-error-7a036050-80131506-mscoree-dll.

Thank you to Michael Sync for the helpful and detailed walkthrough.

I installed the updates from the Microsoft site as recommended and everything now seems to be working just fine.

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