Copy all user settings to another user

Question

Recently I've been getting a very strange error from visual studio 2010, which has been stopping me from building/running or building/debugging projects at all. I do not know why.

It is quite obscure, and a search on google revealed 5 results, of which only 2 were english and relevant.

However it seems to work fine for other users (windows 7). For example currently I'm using the "Cam" account but VS2010 works perfectly and doesn't show the error on the "Guest" account.

How can I copy all of my visual studio settings from the Guest account to my own user account on my computer?

By the way, here is the error in case anyone has a solution to it. This happens whenever I create a new project and try to build it, or whenever I try to build one of my projects that worked prior to this error's arrival.

CL : fatal error C1033: cannot open program database ''

Answer 1

Your per-user settings appear to be in the registry in HKCU\Software\VisualStudio\10.0 and on disk in \Users\ABC\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0. I'd delete / rename these out of the way and let Visual Studio recreate them with defaults. It might also be worth checking your user environment settings for anything odd looking.

However it sounds like you might have odd file permissions - have you been running VS as administrator e.g. to use IIS? It might be worth getting a clean checkout of your code just in case.

There's presumably a macro in one of these files it uses to generate the .pdb (ncb?) name that has been blanked or similar - I can't think what else would cause that error.