Visual studio 2010 Errors out on starting "-832" is not a valid value for property "width"

Question

My Visual Studio 2010 was working fine this morning (I run in in XP sP3 under Paralles) I restarted the entire laptop and I started getting this error. I even uninstalled VS2010, deleted the Visual Studio 20010 directory on the My Documents area and reinstalled it, and it is still giving me that error every time I try to start it. I'm not sure if stackoverflow is the place to ask it, but I am at my wits end trying to get this running again (trying to avoid rebuilding the entire Virtual PC) Does anyone know how to fix this?

Answer 1

Not sure how this is caused, but possibly related to having multiple monitors - I have been alternating between running 1 or 2 monitors. Found a solution here:

http://rainabba.blogspot.com/2010/07/visual-studio-2010-wont-start-120-is.html

Basically, the erroneous negative width value(s) are stored in the registry, not on disk, so try this solution before the other destructive solutions in this SO question.

Fire up regedit, and navigate to:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\MainWindow

Edit the registry value, replacing any negative numbers with positive numbers (I replaced two instances of '-1' with '200')

Answer 2

Starting with Visual Studio 2017, settings are now stored in a private registry hive. You will need to first load the VS2017 registry hive:

1. Select HKEY_USER in regedit.exe
2. File -> Load Hive
3. Browse to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\15.0_{INSTANCE}
4. Select privateregistry.bin and click open
5. Give the loaded hive a name such as VS2017
6. Once the hive is loaded, locate the MainWindow value and fix the negative value in it.
7. The private hive can only be used by one application, so you will now need to select the hive you just loaded and unload it with File -> Unload

As for locating which instance is the default instance, I just looked for the most recently update file.

Answer 3

This solution of changing any negative values to a positive value in the MainWindow registry entry also works for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio - tested on v13.0.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\SQL Server Management Studio\13.0\ MainWindow