SQL Server Management Studio Startup
When Microsoft's SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) starts it tries to connect the Certificate Revocation List (CRL) of Microsoft:
http://crl.microsoft.com/pki/crl/products/MicrosoftRootAuthority.crl
The underlying .NET components of SSMS are trying to contact the Certificate Revocation List and SSMS is unable to do so. This slows down the overall loading procedure. (15 seconds per certificate apparently)
Ok so here is what is happening. SSMS has a high percentage of managed code, all of this code is signed when we ship it. At start up (if this setting is checked) the .Net Runtime tries to contact crl.microsoft.com to ensure that the cert is valid(there were some fake certs issued in Microsoft’s name a while back so this is a very valid concern). If there is no internet connection or there is a problem contacting the certificate revocation list server then this will delay SSMS startup.
Reference: FAQ, Why does SSMS take 45s to start up? (MSDN Blog)
One issue that can cause this problem is that if the server does not have access to the internet, then the .NET framework can’t access the crl.microsoft.com website to verify that the digital signatures used to sign the binaries for managed applications are valid. Each certificate check has a 15 second timeout in the .NET runtime implementation. Depending on what features are installed, this can add up to a minute of startup time for Management Studio.
Reference: SQL Server Management Studio Startup Time (MSDN Blog)
Solutions
You can circumvent part of the issue, by downloading the certificate directly be entering the link into your browser and then importing the certificate to your certificate database
You can reconfigure your (company's) firewall to allow connections to Microsoft's CRL
You can reconfigure your personal antivirus/firewall to allow connections to the Microsoft CRL
You can configure your (company's) firewall to send a timeout faster to your client for requests accessing Microsoft's CRL.
You can configure IE to no longer "Check publisher's certificate revocation" in the advanced settings.
(See above mentioned blogs 1 and 2 for details)
To fix the error, you should understand the actual error which is not displayed in the screenshot that you've provided in your question. You can view the actual error by reading the application events within the event viewer when the error occurs.
- Start by writing down the timestamp when the error happens.
- Open Event Viewer
- View the application logs and match the error message with the timestamp when the error occurred.
It's pretty common knowledge that Microsoft displays friendly errors to users when errors occur by default which generally leads the end user to questions that cant be answered, friendly error messages only complicate questions. You need to view the source. Feel free to ask your question again so that a professional can provide you a better professional response from a professionally written question with all the required dependencies.
Best Answer
Two options:
From some reason the link that worked yesterday now does not work (thank you Microsoft!). The working link is The latest supported Visual C++ downloads
SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is an integrated environment for managing any SQL infrastructure, from SQL Server to Azure SQL Database. SSMS provides tools to configure, monitor, and administer instances of SQL Server and databases. Use SSMS to deploy, monitor, and upgrade the data-tier components used by your applications, and build queries and scripts. Use SSMS to query, design, and manage your databases and data warehouses, wherever they are - on your local computer, or in the cloud. SSMS is free!
My, personal opinion, choose option2. SSMS 18.4 is available since 4 November 2019 and has (AFAIK) the same functionality compared to SSMS 17.x