Object reference not set to an instance of an object while using "Add Connection" & "Query Designer"

It seems like Visual Studio drops a setting needed by OLE DB drivers. The solution to my problems was a simple one but finding it was not!! It took me freaking 3 months to find a way to be able to use Visual Studio (any version) with Access Databases again.

4 months ago I formatted my harddrives and reinstalled everything from scratch. It took only 3 weeks or so before I lost the built in query designer and add connection.

You need to do some simple regediting... I've made a .reg file to do this automatically from now on but I recon noone likes to run .reg files that other people created because of possible security threats so I'll just let you have the way to do it yourselves. :)

1. Run regedit.exe;
2. Browse to the location "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{F9AE8980-7E52-11d0-8964-00C04FD611D7}" in the tree;
3. Locate the child node in the tree called "ProgID"
4. If there is no key you need to create it by Right-clicking the node and select "New > Key";
5. Enter "ProgID" as the name;
6. Go to the main window (the one to the right) and double click "(Default)" within ProgID;
7. Enter the value "MSIDXS.1";

Simple huh? ;) But very useful!