I installed the SE 2008 trial (and unfortunately, it found my older SE setup and tried to open the workspace, causing all sorts of grief). After I got it installed and running, I tried to duplicate the problem. I created an empty workspace, then added the remote project to the workspace. After a couple of hours of building the tagfile, I checked things out - it found the source, showed me references, and looked good. I shut down SE and then restarted, just to see if things would come back. I got:
Unhandled exception at 0x1016bc8c in vs.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00f4d000.
Removing the workspace from vrestore.slk didn't get the error to go away. I uninstalled SE 2008, then removed my old version of SE from my system (so SE 2008 wouldn't read any junk out of it). I then re-installed SE 2008, and made sure it could open & close without a trap. I then tried to repeat the problem (including waiting a couple more hours to build that tag file - yeah, I know, I could probably use a much smaller test, but I want to be sure)...
I can open & close the workspace without hanging.... so far. I'm going to keep beating on it to be sure, but initial results look good.
I then tried the other side of this coin. I noticed that if I closed SE with the workspace open, then disconnected from the network, and opened SE (so I could edit a local file), it went into the weeds trying to access the remote project. I did the same with SE 2008, and it did go dead. It stayed unresponsive for a few minutes (didn't even paint the client area), and then finally popped up a message that said:
Project 'C:\Program Files\SlickEdit 2008\' should have a .vpj extension
Hmmm, it seems a bit confused. When I dismissed that popup, I saw one that said Error opening project file (with the correct name of the unavailable network project). I dismissed that one, and immediately got another one of the first popups. After a few minutes, I could finally get the main SE window to respond so I could close the workspace, and then I could work on local files. However, I think it was still a bit sick, because when I closed SE (this should have saved a state that didn't have a workspace open) and re-opened it, I went through the same business with the futile search for the missing project file.
Enough testing for one day, I've got code to write!