So this morning I decided that I would kick-start my SharePoint 2013 investigation with understanding the implications of the Design View being deprecated in SharePoint Designer 2013 (SharePoint No-Designer anyone?).

Every time I tried to open a site in SPD 2013, I would get a nasty crash. A quick search led me to discover that I was not the only one – see here for more info.

Basically, it appears to be related to duplicate registry entry that can occur if you have a “side by side installation” of a previous version of SPD alongside 2013. To me, this seems like a pretty likely scenario, as SPD has always been pretty pernickity about the version of SharePoint it would work with; so, if you are regular SPD user, you will probably have multiple versions installed on your machine.

Fortunately, it is pretty easy to resolve.

Note: The steps here involve making a registry edit. If you don’t know what that is, then stop and leave and ask someone who does to help you (please).

1. Open the registry editor and check if ClientGUID value under HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice14.0CommonOpen FindMicrosoft SharePoint DesignerSettingsOpen Site
   is the same as the ClientGUID value under
   HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice15.0CommonOpen FindMicrosoft SharePoint DesignerSettingsOpen Site
2. If the values are the same, delete both of them.

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