How to resolve errors opening currentsettings.vssettings in the final release of VS 2005

I have heard from a few customers who have run into some strange behavior in the Visual Studio IDE after uninstalling previous beta versions and installing the final release of Visual Studio 2005. They have reported seeing issues including (but not necessarily limited to) the following:

  • Visual Studio shows an error message stating that it cannot open "C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Settings\currentsettings.vssettings" for writing
  • Launching Tools | Import and Export Settings... and choosing any of the radio buttons results in an error message stating "Error 1: Reset/Export/Import was interrupted by the user".
  • Keyboard shortcuts fail to work correctly in the Visual Studio IDE

For the customers I have worked with so far, the following steps have resolved this issue:

  1. Close all instances of the Visual Studio IDE
  2. Click on the Start menu, choose Run and type cmd
  3. Type "%programfiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /resetuserdata (this command assumes that you have installed VS 2005 to the default path, so you will have to modify this command line if you installed to a non-default path)
  4. Wait 1-2 minutes for the devenv.exe process to finish. You can use Task Manager to verify that the process has completed
  5. Restart the Visual Studio IDE