This article is concerned with the investigation of a two-dimensional thermo-visco-elastic problem of an infinitely extended thin plate containing a circular hole. The material is a viscoelastic solid of Kelvin-Voigt type. The formulation of the problem is based on the generalized theory of thermoelasticity proposed by Lord and Shulman. The inner boundary of the hole in the plate is stressfree and is subjected to a step rise in temperature. Laplace transform technique is applied to obtain the short-time approximations for the distribution of displacement, temperature, and stresses. It is observed that the deformation and the radial stress are continuous at the thermal wave front, while the temperature and the hoop stress suffer discontinuities at the thermal wave front. The discontinuities at the wave front of various fields have also been analyzed. Using PC the numerical values of the displacement, temperature, and stresses at different points are computed numerically and the results are displayed graphically for an appropriate material for illustration.