Toolbox control tabs/groups won't go away.

Question

I've tried to clean up the multitude of tabs/groups of controls in my Toolbox. There is a ton of stuff that I won't ever use (mobile web forms, reporting stuff, etc...) and it has accumulated over time.

I've tried deleting them, but upon restarting Visual Studio, they reappear. How do I get rid of them for good?

Answer 1

First, right-click the toolbox and select Choose Items. Untick the ones you don't want.

If that doesn't help then try recovering the toolbox by using Reset.

If that doesn't help then you may have to clean the toolbox directory by hand and delete stray assembly copies that got left there. This btw can get really out of hand and severely slowdown the toolbox initialization. Navigate to c:\users\yourname\appdata\local\microsoft\visualstudio\9.0 and look for DLLs in subdirectories there.