Visual Studio 2022: AWS Toolkit broken, won't let me reinstall

Question

I am running Visual Studio 2022 with the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio. Up until very recently it was working fine, but now when I load VS I see the following error:

If I click Yes (and repeat each time the popup appears), when VS is finished loading, I see this in AWS Explorer:

If I go to the VS Extension Manager, and browse for AWS Toolkit, it shows in the browse list and indicates that it is not installed:

So then, I clicked Install and went through the process of installing the extension and closed VS as instructed. The VSIX installer appears for a while, and then I see the message below, indicating that the extension is already installed:

After opening VS, I still get the initial "'AWSToolkitPackage' package did not load correctly" popup, and Extension Manager still shows the AWS Toolkit as not being installed.

Has anyone else ever encountered this error? How do I fix this?

Answer 1

Official Answer from AWS from Issue 441:

We have published a new version (1.54.0.1) to the extension marketplace.

With this release,

• we have added some safeguards that should prevent the extension's startup from failing
• we have added more logging to help diagnose if a similar problem persists Please share whether or not you have been able to start using the updated extension. If you had issues installing and starting version 1.54.0.0 of the extension, and also continue to see problems with version 1.54.0.1, please try the following:
• from a Visual Studio Developer Command prompt, run VSIXInstaller.exe /u:0B82CB16-0E52-4363-9BC0-61E758689176 to uninstall the extension. restart your system
• ensure that Visual Studio starts up clean (without any extension start-up issues or messages)
• confirm that Visual Studio does not report the AWS Toolkit as installed in the Extension Manager
• try installing the AWS Toolkit