I'm trying to open a user control in one of our projects. It was created, I believe, in VS 2003, and the project has been converted to VS2008. I can view the code fine, but when I try to load the designer view, VS stops responding and I have to close it with the task manager. I have tried leaving it running for several minutes, but it does not do anything. I ran "devenv /log" but didn't see anything unusual in the log. I can't find a specific error message anywhere. Any idea what the problem might be? Is there a lightweight editing mode I might be able to use or something?

The reason I need to have a look at the visual representation of this control is to decide where to insert some new components.

I've tried googling it and searching SO, but either I don't know what to search or there is nothing out there about this. Any help is appreciated.

(The strangest thing is that the user control seems to load fine in another project which references, but VS crashes as soon as I even so much as click on it in that project.)