SQL Server Management Studio - unable to see all the menus and unresponsive when managing SQL instances!!!
In addition to the blog post SSMS-waiting-for-an-internal-operation-to-complete I have faced additional problems such as all the menus aren't displayed within SQL Server Management Studio from the same laptop.
Other users within our team has observed similar behaviour within their Management Studio (SSMS) screens (using desktop) when trying to connect a set of SQL Server instances. The issue isn't persistent and this happens only when we are trying to monitor a replication setup instances. To get more data for this behaviour we have monitored the laptop's and troubled desktops by using PERFMON (SYSMON) for memory, disks & cpu usage. When this behaviour is occuring the Memory usage on these client machines is high and other programs are unresponsive until we kill the SS Management Studio processes using Task Manager. (Laptop & Desktops configuration: 1GB RAM, 80GB HDD, Intel Centrino DUO processor on a 833 mhz speed)
Though this is a not a problem on the server side, we are thinking to report to PSS (Microsoft support) to get a fix or solution, at the same time I have observed the following KBA that talks about the same problem we are facing, Some visual elements in SQL Server Management Studio lose functionality when you register many instances of SQL Server and same about it we have overal 150 SQL instances to support by our team and among them we have nearly 24 instances that are involved in the replication.
Hence this blog post covers about the problem you might face when you have more than 150 SQL instances and your desktop machines are very inferior to support such a task of managing many instances at the same time. The above KBA underlines "SQL Server Management Studio consumes memory from the desktop heap. Depending on the visual element that the registration uses and on the size of desktop heap, the desktop heap may be used up". Download the tool referred on that KBA to monitor the tasks on your support desktop instances.