I had a plugin installed in Visual Studio 2008, and it created some extra dockable windows. I have uninstalled it, and I can't get rid of the windows it created - I close them, but they always come back. They're just empty windows now, since the plugin is no longer present, but nothing I've tried gets rid of them. I've tried:
Any ideas?
Have you tried this? In Visual Studio go to Tools > Import and Export Settings > Reset all settings
Be sure you back up your settings before you do this. I made the mistake of trying this to fix an issue and didn't realize it would undo all my appearance settings and toolbars as well. Took a lot of time to get back to the way I like things.
Try devenv.exe /resetuserdata. I think it's more aggressive than the Tools > Import and Export options suggested.
Also check Tools > Add In Manager and make sure there aren't any orphans there.
How about running the following from command line,
Devenv.exe /ResetSettings
You could also save those settings in to a file, like so,
Devenv.exe /ResetSettings "C:\My Files\MySettings.vssettings"
The /ResetSettings switch, Restores Visual Studio default settings. Optionally resets the settings to the specified .vssettings file.
I close them, but they always come back
When you say "they always come back" do you mean "next time you restart Visual Studio" or "immediately"?
One quirk of Visual Studio (at least VS2005) is that settings aren't saved until you exit. That means that if VS crashes at all while you are using it, any layout changes you made will be lost. The way around this is to always gracefully exit when you have set up everything like you want it to be.
Not sure if this will help your particular situation though.
I tried most of the suggestions, and none of them worked. I didn't get a chance to try /resetuserdata. Finally I reinstalled the plugin and uninstalled it again, and the windows went away.
If you've ever backed up your settings (Tools -> Import and Export Settings), you can restore the settings file to get back to a prior state. This is the only thing that I've found to work.
Window -> Reset Window Layout didn't exist for me. For anybody looking in 2022 or later, I finally found the answer! The crucial information, buried in a VSCode update release note, was right at the bottom of this section. Here it is if the link breaks in the future:
If you'd like to reset all views back to the default layout, you can run
Views: Reset View Locationsfrom the Command Palette.