Visual studio forgets window settings and makes a

Question

I have this problem where I open Visual Studio and the internal windows are scattered all over the place. None of them are docked; some that should be visible have become invisible and vice versa. I then have to spend ages getting the windows back where I like them.

It only seems to happen with some solutions and only appeared recently.

For the life of me I can't fix the problem. Has anyone else been through this?

Answer 1

I had a similar issue when the My Documents folder was stored on a mapped drive. If I opened VS before mapping the drive, VS would act as if it was the first time it had been opened. I solved this issue by storing the environment settings on the local disk.

Answer 2

Visual Studio corrupts its settings with regular monotony (always has done, I've been suffering from this since the Visual C++ days, and it's still a bugbear in VS2013).

Often this seems to be totally at random, but it's highly probable after a crash.

It will also lose any changes to your settings if Visual Studio doesn't shut down cleanly - for some reason instead of saving back the settings when you OK the dialog, VS seems to wait until it quits to write back your changes, so after changing options I always quit and restart to ensure the changes have been flushed to disk. Similarly you should never change options with 2 or more instances of VS running, as the last one to quit will overwrite the settings.

In particular, there is an easily reproducible case: If you launch two or more copies at the same time (by which I mean if you start up two or more copies, so they are all initialising at the same time), they seem to fight over the settings file and it becomes corrupted or resets to defaults.

The best two workarounds I've found are:

• Never launch more than one instance at a time. If you need to run several instances concurrently, then wait for the first one to finish loading its Solution before you start to launch the next.

• Always use Tools > Import and Export Settings to save your settings to a backup file, so that recovering from this corruption only takes a few seconds each time it happens.

Another smaller, but still rather irritating habit is that if VS is minimised when it is quit (e.g. by shutting down), it corrupts its window position information and the next time you run it, it will be maximised.

Answer 3

Which solution you're opening shouldn't matter because those settings are not solution-specific. But I wonder do you maybe have Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 installed? If so, opening a solution created in 2005 will open VS 2005 and opening a 2008 solution will open VS 2008. You may have VS 2005 even if you didn't install it. For example, InfoPath 2007 installs a VS 2005 shell.

First I would position the windows where you want them, then do a Tools -> Export Settings and include only the window layouts. That way you at least have something you can revert to.

Then I would check Tools -> Options -> Import Export Settings and make note of where the "Automatically Save My Settings To This File" path is set to. Keep an eye on that file. Do you have any sync software that may be inadvertently overwriting it? Does it point to a non-existing location?

Answer 4

Actually I worked out what the culprit was: previous VS crashes.

If one of my Visual Studio instances crashes for whatever reason - the next time I start up VS, I get a weird batch of settings. The behaviour depends on various factors, like whether or not I had other instances of VS open at the time.

Answer 5

I tried Peter McGrattan's solution, still didn't help. What ended up working for me was to delete my VS Solution User Options (.sou). Located in the same directory as my solution.

Only bad thing is you have to redo all of your settings. This included my exception changes. Not to much to change, but if you have a lot of customization it could be a real pain. There must be something in that file messing everything up, but deleting the whole file is quick and easy.

Answer 6

In my case its not the Window layout being corrupted but Intellisense offering code completion and pop-up help. Never had this issue for the last decade, now it happens 3 times a day at least. Win8.1, Visual Studio 2013, ReSharper 8 and now ReSharper 9 (in hopes the upgrade would fix it).

I now routinely have to

• close the solution,
• Tools/Import-Export Settings/Reset all settings
• Close Visual Studio
• Open Visual Studio Import my saved settings
• RE-open the solution and continue working

I can then work fine again for quite some time until something goes awry... lets say a stack-overflow while I'm debugging. At that point I just know my settings are screwed and my Intellisense is dead again.

I'm starting to wonder if it isn't something to do with a latest Visual Studio update. There are things in there I never use like the advertising crap and Office development integration. MS Office has its own issues, like Office 64 bit not being seen by any other application such as Quicken as an installed email program. Or maybe its a conflict with ReSharper which wants to overtake and 'extend' the Intellisense feature.

Either way, I'm sure its a different manifestation of the same issue: Visual Studio settings are going sideways during normal use.