/resetuserdata Switch
The last tip that I will share with you concerns the /resetuserdata switch. You can use this switch to reset Visual Studio to its out-of-box state if Visual Studio ever runs into a damaged state that you cannot recover from. Examples of these problems may be a corrupted window layout file, corrupted menu customization file, or corrupted keyboard shortcuts file. Disclaimer: you will lose all your environment settings and customizations if you use this switch. It is for this reason that this switch is not officially supported and Microsoft does not advertise this switch to the public (you won't see this switch if you type devenv.exe /? in the command prompt). You should only use this switch as the last resort if you are experiencing an environment problem, and make sure you back up your environment settings by exporting them before using this switch.
To use this switch, do the following:
- Shut down all instances of Visual Studio 2005.
- Click Start, the choose Run....
- Type "devenv.exe /resetuserdata".
This command will take a couple of minutes to run as Visual Studio cleans up and sets itself back to its original state. You may open Task Manager at this point to check whether the devenv.exe process is still running. After it has completed running, you can restart Visual Studio. You will then be greeted by the first launch dialog again, as if you are running Visual Studio for the first time on your machine.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb245788(vs.80).aspx#vs05idetips_topic6