While undoubtedly Visual Studio 2008 is a great development tools, it has been reported to be constant crashing and cause the IDE to shutdown unexpectedly and this may causes unsaved work losses.
An description from the MSDN KB state the following:
VS2008 SP1: In Visual Studio 2008 SP1, having windows in non-default locations, for example after docking and undocking windows, when switching between debugging and designing or switching to/from full screen, can result in a crash of the Visual Studio IDE.
This Hotfix was updated on May 11, 2009 to address a shortcoming with the original Hotfix (published Mar 12, 2009) whereby XAML Intellisense may cease functioning after applying the Hotfix. If you have applied the original Hotfix, it is not necessary to uninstall it to apply the updated (V2) Hotfix.
The hotfix for the issue can be downloaded from here : http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB960075
