Visual studio forgets window settings and makes a mess

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 in

Answer 1

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 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

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.

Answer 4

Sounds like there is definitely a problem with Visual Studio retaining your settings between round-trips and possibly your Visual Studio settings profile in general.

The solution I'd recommend is firstly to reset all settings, secondly customize things to your personal preference and finally take a backup of those customized settings. The idea is that this settings backup file can be used later to automate a quick settings restore to a point you are happy with. The following steps show how to do this and hopefully should sort out even the most confused Visual Studio setting issues:

1. Close down all instances of Visual Studio.

2. Go to Start > Programs > Visual Studio 200X > Visual Studio Tools > and choose 'Visual Studio 200X Command Prompt'

3. Run the sligthly less well known 'devenv.exe /ResetUserData' command. With this command you will lose all of your Visual Studio environment settings and customizations. Because of this, the /ResetUserData switch is not officially supported and Microsoft does not advertise it (the switch is not described in the help for devenv.exe you get when you type devenv.exe /? in a command prompt). Importantly, wait for the resulting devenv.exe process to disappear from Task Manager or even better Process Explorer.

4. When the process disappears from Task Manager or Process Explorer, run 'devenv.exe /ResetSettings' which will restore the IDE's default settings and eventually start a single instance of Visual Studio.

5. Now in Visual Studio choose 'Import and Export Settings...' near the bottom of the 'Tools' menu to start the Import and Export Settings Wizard.

6. Choose 'Reset all settings' radio button and Next > Choose 'No, just reset settings, overwriting my current settings' and Next > Choose your personal 'Settings Collection' preference, I would choose Visual C# Development Settings here (Note: What you choose here has an effect on keyboard shortcuts etc. but you can always repeat this process until happy) and click Finish.

7. When you get the message that 'Your settings were successfully reset to XXXXXX Development Settings.' click Close then spend a good bit of time adding any personal customizations to Visual Studio such as opening windows you always want open, customizing toolbars and adding any toolbar buttons etc.

8. When you are finished with your personal customization and completely happy with your setup go again to Tools > 'Import and Export Settings...'

9. Choose 'Export selected environment settings' radio button and Next > Tick 'All Settings' and Next > Choose a file name and directory and click Finish to store a backup of your current settings in a .vssettings file.

10. In future if things go haywire again head back to Tools > 'Import and Export Settings...' and this time choose 'Import selected environment settings' radio button and Next > Choose 'No, just import new settings, overwriting my current settings' and Next > Either choose the name of your .vssettings file from the list (usually under the My Settings folder) or Browse.. to where you saved the file and Next > Tick 'All Settings' and click Finish.

11. Importantly, close the single instance of Visual Studio. Any future instance you open should retain your latest customizations.

Answer 5

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 6

I'm facing similar issue. And it also only started recently, like, within the last 30 days or so. The only thing I remember changing in this period was updating Resharper 4.5.