Ran into a situation when deploying to the Emulator with Visual Studio 2008, Windows 7 and the compact framework.  Everytime I attempted to deploy the emulator would have the spinning circle (center of image below)



Visual Studio would stop responding and generate an error message. 

I had reset my computer and received the same results. 

Everything had been working without issue so I undid prior code changes, rebuilt and still my Visual Studio would lock up and my Emulator would stay with the spinning circle.

Since the emulator was still running I treated it like a Device and stopped the running program and tried again.  Still locking up Visual Studio.  I then did a Hard Reset on the emulator and walla!  I was back in business - Visual Studio 2008 was happy again.