Question

Every time I launch Visual Studio 2010, it creates a directory called “Visual Studio 2010” in the current working directory at the time I launched it. It just started doing this at the same time that it forgot all of my toolbar settings and so on.

I’ve clearly got an incorrect setting somewhere, but I can’t find it.

Under Tools\Options\Projects and Solutions\General I have:

Projects location:
D:\ian

User project templates location:
M:\Visual Studio 2010\Templates\ProjectTemplates

User item templates location:
M:\Visual Studio 2010\Templates\ItemTemplates

How do I stop this spurious .\Visual Studio 2010 directory being created and tell it to use the proper one on M:\ instead?

Edit: Since I’ve started a bounty on this, please be reasonable and don’t post a suggestion that doesn’t answer the question. For example, don’t say ‘Have you tried reinstalling?’ or ‘Have you tried deleting all your settings?’ Thank you for your understanding.

Answer 1

This is the final answer that worked for me.

It turns out that Visual Studio 2010 regularly and automatically exports your settings file. (You would probably expect it to save your settings on exit, but not export them unless you explicitly ask it to.) I think it does this every time you quit, but it seems to create the directory into which it will export as soon as it is launched. This is the problem I was seeing.

This is how I resolved it:

Tools > Options > Environment > Import and Export Settings

The field Automatically save my settings to this file: was just Visual Studio 2010\Current Settings.vssettings. This is a relative path, so the folder Visual Studio 2010 was being created in the current working directory. I changed it to an absolute path M:\Visual Studio 2010\Current Settings.vssettings and this solved the problem.