What you did was the correct way. If Visual Studio also deadlocks, that happens now and then. It's just bad luck, unless there's some other issue.
You don't have to run the application in the debugger in order to debug it. Run the application normally, and if the deadlock happens, you can attach VS later. Ctrl+Alt+P, select the process, choose debugger type and click attach. Using a different set of debugger types might reduce the risk of VS crashing (especially if you don't debug native code)
A deadlock involves 2 or more threads. You probably know the first one (probably your UI thread) since you noticed the deadlock in your application. Now you only need to find the other one. With knowledge of the architecture, it should be easy to find (e.g. what other threads use the same locks, interact with the UI etc)
If VS doesn't work at all, you can always use windbg. Download here: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/default.mspx
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