Visual Studio stops loading after attempting to open a solution

Ok, so, sometimes when you've been screwing around with a solution (e.g. taking a copy of an offline solution that is normally attached to TFS) and you open it you'll find that Visual Studio chokes and never finishes loading:

And you see the balloon we all love so much

I seem to encounter this the second time I open a solution, the first time it opens fine.  Visual Studio can sit in this state forever.  Or at least for so long that I can't be bothered waiting any longer. Then it needs to be killed via Task Manager.  This kind of sucks.

To fix this you can try deleting the .suo files for the solution.  These are Visual Studios solution user options files.  They are hidden files so you might need to tell explorer to show them:

Send them to the trash and next time you open the solution it might load a bit better.

HINZ 2013 Conference - a review in bullet points so I don't have to write coherently or in quantity

• HINZ = Health Informatics New Zealand. What is an informatic? 
• Rotorua is pretty cool.  (this is not sarcasm)
• So many TrendCare dolls my colleagues accused me of acquiring them through illicit means
• QualIT have really nice free pens, they have a solid, well made feel to them.  Would probably draw blood if thrown at a colleague.
• Vendors are generally not very good at software innovation.  Wow look at the CSC & Orion booths.
• There were a lot of managers talking to other managers about manager things. Where my dev buddies at?
• It was jolly nice to talk to some folk from the other DHBs and to share some knowledge and maybe some code.
• Conclusion: this is not a conference for developers, you won't learn anything practical, but the food is ok and if you want you can stare at the hot bubbling mud and imagine throwing vendor software in there.

From Wikipedia:  Health informatics is a discipline at the intersection of information science, computer science, and health care. It deals with the resources, devices, and methods required to optimize the acquisition, storage, retrieval blah blah blah no one cares