And it happened to me too...I was trying to add some new controls to my toolbox (the Silverlight toolkit in the specific) and I got that nasty IDE crash, it all shut down without notice nor errors.

I started to look around in the Internet to see if some else had the same problem with a solution for it and I came to this forum post, which states it clearly a conflict between PowerCommands and VS2008 SP1:

Xaml Editor, Class Explorer Crashes after Visual Studio 2008 SP1

They propose two solutions:

1- a workaround from Microsoft, that I report here:

Through Microsoft's help they came up with a work around which is a simple modification to the devenv.exe.config file.
This will exist in (64 bit systems) C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE
Or (32 bit systems) C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE
Add this XML token to the dependentAseembly list. They had me add it after the office one, but im not sure if that matters.

<dependentAssembly> 
    <assemblyIdentity name="office" publicKeyToken="71e9bce111e9429c" culture="neutral"/> 
    <codeBase version="12.0.0.0" href="PrivateAssemblies\Office12\Office.dll"/> 
</dependentAssembly>

New stuff        

<dependentAssembly> 
    <assemblyIdentity name="Microsoft.PowerCommands" publicKeyToken="null" culture="neutral"/> 
    <codeBase version="1.1.0.0" href="C:\Program Files\PowerCommands\Microsoft.PowerCommands.dll"/> 
</dependentAssembly>

2- if the former doesn’t work for you (it worked for me), you just have to uninstall PowerCommands.

If you try to use the workaround, pay attention to use the correct path where you have your PowerCommands installed.

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