[RESOLVED] [2008] Help with settings

[ShiftySid]

I have accidentally clicked a tick box somewhere in the settings so everytime I debug an application about a million "autos", "watch" and "breakpoint" windows open up too. When I end the application, they all close - but it takes forever and ruins the layout of my Properties and Server Explorer windows.

Any idea what I have switched on - and more importantly how to turn the damn thing off?

I have deleted all my vssettings files and removed/reinstalled VS2008 to no avail. Even resetting to defaults resets everything BUT this.

Please help!

[kleinma]

you can try clicking the "reset window layout" under the window menu (either at design time, or while its running and you see your issue.)

If that doesn't work, then I would try running devenv.exe (the IDE) from the run command in the startmenu, with the following switches:

devenv.exe /resetsettings (try this one first)
devenv.exe /resetskippkgs

Also make sure you are running SP1

[ShiftySid]

None of those work unfortunately.

Every single app I press F5 on brings up the following windows:

Watch1
Watch2
Watch3
Watch4
Autos
Breakpoint
Object Test Bench
Threads
Processes
Modules
Call Stack

I would ignore it if it didn't take so long to run the EXE - and then it takes an age when you stop the debugging, only to find the toolbox, properties and server windows are undocked and all over the screen.

I can't for the life of me find what caused it. I am on the verge of wiping the hard disk and starting again - it's that bad!

[ShiftySid]

Resolved!

I deleted the contents of

c:\documents and settings\<user>\application data\microsoft\visual studio\9.0

This on its own did not get rid of all those windows but it did dock them neatly along the bottom of the IDE. Whilst in debug mode, I clicked their respective 'x's to close down - none have come back.

No idea why this did not get reset by resetting the user settings, but all sorted now.

[kleinma]

did it look anything like this?

I had a weird issue once with Visual Studio that undocked all my windows and also brought up the docking help for what looked like every single window at once. I was able to screen capture it when it happened, and I sent it to Microsoft, but I was never able to repro it, and neither could they.

[ShiftySid]

Yes - exactly like that but without the docking helpers. I thought I accidentially triggered it because I was looking at all the settings in Tools | Options and thought I may have ticked something by mistake. I compared every setting to my home laptop and they were identical - it wasn't that.

I did have a problem with profile redirection at work today, though. Everything in My Documents (including the files I eventually deleted to resolve the problem) gets re-directed (and synchronised) with a remote server - I wonder if that screwed it up somehow? Do you use folder re-direction on the machine in question?

[kleinma]

No, the machine I had the issue with is just an XP box not on a domain.

I think I maybe saw it happen twice ever, the second time it happened i snapped the above screenshot. If you note from the screenshot, you can see it did happen at the same time though, when i hit F5 to start running the app from within the IDE.

Another note is I didn't have to reinstall or delete any files for it to go away. If I remember right it just went away on its own, maybe I rebooted or something, but nothing manual was done to try to fix it.

[ShiftySid]

Ok thanks, although I rebooted and re-installed and reset all default settings but still the bugger would not shift. Still working fine this morning so thanks for your assistance.