A problem occurred while trying to set the "Sources" parameter for the IDE's in-process compiler

Today a power outage screwed something in my Visual Studio installation. For the life of me I couldn't figure out what went wrong and I also didn't have the time to properly investigate. The issue appeared when I restarted the computer, ran Visual Studio 2010, loaded a project (any project) and tried to compile. Invariably, an error would prevent me from building the project:Error 22 A problem occurred while trying to set the "Sources" parameter for the IDE's in-process compiler. Error creating instance of managed object 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.CSharp.Services.Language.Features.EditAndContinue.EncState' (Error code is 0x80131604). Application.

I have tried disabling Edit and Continue, I've tried to disable the Exception Assistant and also I've re-registered the dlls in the Visual Studio 10.0/Common7/IDE folder, all to no avail. Even worse, it seemed as I am the only person on Google (yay!) that got this error so I couldn't find a quick no effort solution (boo!). The error code 0x80131604 stands for HRESULT COR_E_TARGETINVOCATION, or a TargetInvocationException, which is thrown by methods invoked through reflection. So that is that.

The solution was to reinstall Visual Studio. It took half a day, but it fixed it. If you have met the same issue and you found a quicker way, please leave a comment.