I'm running VS 2010 on an XP machine, and occasionally, it will cease drawing guidelines (the lines showing you which control lines up where, and the dotted boxes around selected controls) in design mode. Also, it won't render gradients used as control backgrounds. These gradients won't render when I run the application, nor will they render when I run a built version of the application. Is Visual Studio messing up some setting on my computer? I was once able to fix it by reinstalling ClearType, but it was obviously a temporary fix. Now all I can do is restart my computer. Has anyone else dealt with this problem?