How do I REALLY reset the Visual Studio window layout?

Question

Have you tried this? In Visual Studio go to Tools > Import and Export Settings > Reset all settings

Be sure you back up your settings before you do this. I made the mistake of trying this to fix an issue and didn't realize it would undo all my appearance settings and toolbars as well. Took a lot of time to get back to the way I like things.

Try devenv.exe /resetuserdata. I think it's more aggressive than the Tools > Import and Export options suggested.

Also check Tools > Add In Manager and make sure there aren't any orphans there.

How about running the following from command line,

Devenv.exe /ResetSettings

You could also save those settings in to a file, like so,

Devenv.exe /ResetSettings "C:\My Files\MySettings.vssettings"

The /ResetSettings switch, Restores Visual Studio default settings. Optionally resets the settings to the specified .vssettings file.

MSDN link

I had similar problem except that it happened without installing any plugin. I begin to get this dialog about source control every time I open the project + tons of windows popping up and floating which I had to close one by one.

Windows -> Rest Windows Layout, fixed it for me without any problems. It does bring the default setting which I don't mind at all :)

If you have an old backup copy of CurrentSettings.vssettings, you can try restoring it.

I had a completely corrupted Visual Studio layout. When I tried to enter debug, I was told that VS had become unstable. When I restarted, my window layout would then be totally screwed. I tried restoring the VS current user settings in the registry from a backup, but that didn't help. However, restoring CurrentSettings.vssettings seems to have cured it.

There seems to be a bunch of binary stuff in there and I can imagine it gets irretrievably corrupted sometimes.

Note: if you have vs2010 and vs2008 and you want to reset the 2008, you will need to specify in command line the whole path. like this:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /resetsettings

If you don't specify the path (like devenv.exe /resetsettings), it will reset the latest version of Visual studio installed on your computer.

I close them, but they always come back

When you say "they always come back" do you mean "next time you restart Visual Studio" or "immediately"?

One quirk of Visual Studio (at least VS2005) is that settings aren't saved until you exit. That means that if VS crashes at all while you are using it, any layout changes you made will be lost. The way around this is to always gracefully exit when you have set up everything like you want it to be.

Not sure if this will help your particular situation though.