Visual studio 2010 Errors out on starting "-832" is not a valid value for property "width"

Question

My Visual Studio 2010 was working fine this morning (I run in in XP sP3 under Paralles) I restarted the entire laptop and I started getting this error. I even uninstalled VS2010, deleted the Visual Studio 20010 directory on the My Documents area and reinstalled it, and it is still giving me that error every time I try to start it. I'm not sure if stackoverflow is the place to ask it, but I am at my wits end trying to get this running again (trying to avoid rebuilding the entire Virtual PC) Does anyone know how to fix this?

Answer 1

Do you see anything in the application event log?

Try these

• devenv /ResetSettings

• devenv /installvstemplates

Delete contents in here: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplatesCache

Answer 2

Try deleting files under <username>\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Settings. That's where your user preferences are stored, including (I think) which windows you placed where. These are not deleted when you uninstall or reinstall VS, so if something is botched in there it will still be botched after a reinstall. Also look for droppings under <username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0.

Answer 3

Not sure how this is caused, but possibly related to having multiple monitors - I have been alternating between running 1 or 2 monitors. Found a solution here:

http://rainabba.blogspot.com/2010/07/visual-studio-2010-wont-start-120-is.html

Basically, the erroneous negative width value(s) are stored in the registry, not on disk, so try this solution before the other destructive solutions in this SO question.

Fire up regedit, and navigate to:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\MainWindow

Edit the registry value, replacing any negative numbers with positive numbers (I replaced two instances of '-1' with '200)