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 invisible and vice versa. I then have to spend ages getting the windows back where I like them.

It only seems to happen with some solutions and only appeared recently.

For the life of me I can't fix the problem. Has anyone else been through this?

Answer 1

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 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.