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

I tried Peter McG'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 2

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 3

I just ran into this problem too (seemed to trigger after a windows update) where I kept getting some bogus window layout no matter what I did. The above suggestions didn't work either. But luckily the suggestions in: Why doesn't VS 2008 IDE remember my preferences? of deleting:

%APPDATA%\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\windows.prf

worked.

TP

Answer 4

I just came across this issue in VS 2012, reset window layout was doing nothing.

I extrapolated

%APPDATA%\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\windows.prf

to

%appdata%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\Windows.index

... deleted it and was back in business!

• Make sure you close all instances of VS first!

Answer 5

I have experienced something similar. In my case the text editor colors (c# editor for example) are going haywire. The only solution that I tried and works for me is change color theme so something else and then back to what I want.

Answer 6

My issue is similar, but the result is the app crashes. The problem was this value

In HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\MainWindow. It was set to "0 1000 -280 -100 3" probably due to having multiple screens and moving the UI around a lot.

Deleting this value allowed the app to restart successfully. It gets recreated on startup.