As usual I found the solution for this MS problem on a non-Microsoft site. The following blog post has the fix to resolve this issue:
Error: Visual Studio is waiting for an operation to complete.
By the way, I am using VS 2010. This error was first reported for VS 2005. It seems it never got fixed in the subsequent VS releases.
VS shows two options: "Switch To" and "Wait". Both offer no help.
Solution: Kill rdpclip.exe process
Source: http://blog.nicocrm.com/2010/08/07/microsoft-visual-studio-is-waiting-for-an-operation-to-complete/
A Practical Guide to SharePoint 2013
A Practical Guide to SharePoint 2013 - Book by Saifullah Shafiq
