I experienced an issue with the SharePoint Solution Generator today it kept crashing right the first screen (i.e. choosing Site Definition and clicking next).
The exception being thrown shows that the tool is looking for a SharePoint site on the default website i.e. http://ServerName
Now in this paticular case there was no SharePoint site on the on port 80 so http://ServerName would naturually fail.
As much as I would like to I am not going to complain about this being a silly Exception.
The workaround: Create a temporary sharepoint site on port 80.