Visual studio forgets window settings and makes a mess

Question

I have this problem where I open Visual Studio and the internal windows are scattered all over the place. None of them are docked; some that should be visible have become in

Answer 1

I just came across this issue in VS 2012, reset window layout was doing nothing.

I extrapolated

%APPDATA%\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\windows.prf

to

%appdata%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\Windows.index

... deleted it and was back in business!

• Make sure you close all instances of VS first!