Visual Studio forgets window settings and makes mess

Question

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

It is as if this is happening with some decisions and has appeared only recently.

In life, I can’t solve the problem. Has anyone else gone through this?

Answer 1

There seems to be a specific problem with Visual Studio saving your settings between crawls and possibly your Visual Studio settings profile as a whole.

The solution that I would recommend is, firstly, all reset all settings, secondly, adjust things according to your personal preferences and, finally, make a backup copy of these configured parameters. The idea is that you can use this settings backup file later to automate the quick restoration of settings to the extent you are satisfied. The following steps show how to do this, and I hope you should solve even the most complicated problems with installing Visual Studio:

• Close all instances of Visual Studio.

• Go to Start> Programs> Visual Studio 200X> Visual Studio Tools> and choose Visual Studio 200X Command Prompt

• Run the laxatively less well-known devenv.exe / ResetUserData command. With this command you will lose all the settings and settings of the Visual Studio environment. 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, which you get when you enter the devenv.exe /? File on the command line). Importantly, wait until the devenv.exe process disappears from the task manager or even better than Process Explorer.

• When the process disappears from the Task Manager or the Process Explorer, run 'devenv.exe / ResetSettings', which will restore the default IDE settings and, ultimately, start one instance of Visual Studio.

• Now in Visual Studio, select "Import and Export Settings ..." at the bottom of the "Tools" menu to launch the Import and Export Configuration Wizard.

• Select "Reset all settings" and click "Next"> "No", only reset, rewrite my current settings "and" Next ">" Select your personal setting "Settings", C # Development Settings here (Note: what you choose here, it affects keyboard shortcuts, etc., but you can always repeat this process until happy) and click "Finish".

• When you get a message that "Your settings have been successfully reset to XXXXXX development settings." click Close, and then take a little time to add any personal settings in Visual Studio, such as opening windows that you always want to open, customize toolbars and add any buttons on the toolbar, etc.

• When you have finished your personal setup and are completely satisfied with your setup, go again to Tools> "Import and Export Settings ..."

• Select "Export selected environment settings" and click "Next"> "All settings" and "Next"> "Select name and directory" and click "Finish" to save a backup of your current settings in a .vssettings file.

• In the future, if something works again, go back to Tools> "Import and Export Settings ...", and this time select "Import selected environment settings" and click "Next"> "No", just import the new settings, overwriting my current settings "and" Next "> either select the name of your .vssettings file from the list (usually in the" My settings "folder) or" Browse "where you saved the file, and then" Next ">" All settings "and click Done.

• It is important to note that close one instance of Visual Studio. Any future instance that you open should retain your latest settings.

Answer 2

I had a similar problem when the My Documents folder was stored on a mapped drive. If I opened VS before displaying the disk, VS would act as if it were first opened. I solved this problem by saving the environment settings to a local drive.

Answer 3

Visual Studio corrupts its settings with regular monotony (it always did, I suffered from this since Visual C ++, and this is still a bug in VS2013).

Often this seems completely random, but it is very likely after the crash.

It will also lose any changes in your settings if Visual Studio doesn't turn off cleanly - for some reason, instead of saving the settings when you are OK in the dialog box, VS seems to wait until it closes your entries, so after changing the settings I always leave and restart to make sure that the changes have been flushed to disk. Similarly, you should never change the settings with two or more instances of VS, since the last one to exit will overwrite the settings.

In particular, there is an easily reproducible case: if you run two or more copies at the same time (by this I mean, if you run two or more copies, therefore they are all initialized at the same time), they seem to be fighting for the settings file, and it becomes damaged or reset to default.

The best two workarounds I've found are:

• Never run more than one instance at a time. If you need to run several instances at the same time, then wait until the first one finishes downloading its solution before you start the next one.

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

Another small, but still rather annoying habit is that if VS is minimized when it shuts down (for example, disconnecting), it distorts the location information of the window, and at the next start it will be maximized.

Answer 4

I also ran into this problem (it seemed to start after updating Windows), where I continued to get some dummy window layouts no matter what I did. The above suggestions did not work either. But, fortunately, the suggestions are in: Why doesn't the VS 2008 IDE remember my preferences? removal:

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

worked.

TR

Answer 5

In fact, I found out that I was the culprit: previous VS accidents.

If one of my Visual Studio instances fails for any reason - the next time I start VS, I get a strange batch of settings. The behavior depends on various factors, for example, regardless of whether I had other VS instances at that time.

Answer 6

I tried the solution of Peter McGrattan, still did not help. What ended up for me was to remove my custom VS Solution (.sou) options. Located in the same directory as my solution.

Only bad, you have to redo all your settings. This included my exceptions. Not much to change, but if you have a lot of settings, it can be a real pain. This file should have something you need, but deleting the whole file is quick and easy.

Answer 7

Which solution you open does not matter, since these settings are independent of the particular solution. But I wonder if it is possible that you have Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 installed. If so, opening the solution created in 2005 will open VS 2005, and opening the 2008 solution will open VS 2008. You may have VS 2005, even if you did not install it. For example, InfoPath 2007 installs the VS 2005 shell.

First, I would place the windows where you want them, then do Tools → Export Settings and enable only window layouts. So you have at least something that you can return to.

Then I would check Tools → Options → Import Export Settings and remember where the “Automatically save my settings to this file” path is set. Keep an eye on this file. Do you have synchronization software that may be inadvertently overwritten? Does this indicate a non-existent place?

Answer 8

My problem is similar, but the application crashes as a result. The problem was this meaning

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 user interface around a lot.

Removing this value allowed the application to restart successfully. It is recreated at startup.

Answer 9

I ran into a similar problem. And it also started only recently, for example, in the last 30 days or so. The only thing I remember during this period is the Resharper 4.5 update.

Answer 10

I experienced something similar. In my case, the colors of a text editor (for example, the C # editor) go with difficulty. The only solution I tried and works for me is to change the color theme to something else and then go back to what I want.

Answer 11

In my case, this is not a window layout that is damaged, but Intellisense offers completion code and tooltips. There has never been this problem in the last decade, now it happens 3 times a day, at least. Win8.1, Visual Studio 2013, ReSharper 8 and now ReSharper 9 (in the hope that the update will fix it).

Now I usually have to

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

Then I can work fine again for some time, until something goes awry ... lets talk about stack overflow while I'm debugging. At this point, I just know that my settings are screwed up, and my Intellisense is dead again.

I'm starting to wonder if this is due to the latest Visual Studio update. There are things that I never use, like advertising shit and Office development integration. MS Office has its own problems, such as Office 64 bit, which are not visible to any other application, for example Quicken, as an installed email program. Or maybe it’s a conflict with ReSharper, which wants to overtake and “expand” the Intellisense feature.

In any case, I'm sure this is another manifestation of the same problem: Visual Studio settings go sideways under normal use.

Answer 12

I just stumbled upon this problem in VS 2012, reset the window layout didn't do anything.

I extrapolated

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

to

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

... deleted it and returned to business!

• First make sure all VS instances are closed!