OT: "Find" is Broken in Visual Studio

[Bob Johnson]

I'm running Visual Studio 2005 Professional (no VS service pack) on an XP
Pro/SP2 (+ patches and updates). This computer has been stable with no odd
behavior for about a year (since I first built it).

Earlier today the "Find" dialog in Visual Studio stopped working.
Specifically, when I attempt to open the "Find" or the "Find and Replace"
dialogs, they simply fail to appear (it's as if I did not even attempt to
open them):

None of these work:
1. Ctrl + F
2. Ctrl + H
3. Edit | Find and Replace | Find
4. Edit | Find and Replace | Quick Replace

I googled but failed to find anything helpful.

Any suggestions for what I can to do get the Find/Replace capabilities back?

Thanks!

 

[PokerMan]

Restart comp, reinstall vis studio, blah blah. Not really a c# question.

 

[David Connet]

Earlier today the "Find" dialog in Visual Studio stopped working.
Specifically, when I attempt to open the "Find" or the "Find and
Replace" dialogs, they simply fail to appear (it's as if I did not
even attempt to open them):

Sounds like the dialog is off-screen. Try hitting alt+space and manually
moving the dialog back into view.

Dave Connet

 

[Paul Hadfield]

Had this happen myself, very frustrating! No need to re-install or anything
that harsh - but the offscreen thing may be worth a try.

However, this definitely worked for me:

Save (Export) your IDE Settings, then reset them - You should then have your
find dialogs back.
At this point I re-imported my IDE settings until I found the one that broke
the find dialog box (again).

I then repeated the above making sure not to re-import the setting that
broke the IDE.

Hope that helps,

- Paul.

 

[Bob Johnson]

You are correct that there is no need to re-install.

In ended up doing that (actually, selected to Repair the existing
installation, rather than uninstall + reinstall).

BUT that didn't help. Even after repairing and rebooting the dialog still
failed to appear.

So I did a bit more fiddling. I noticed that, when running a Windows app in
debug mode, the Find dialog would appear - right there in the middle of the
code window. But end debug mode and the dialog would NOT appear anywhere.

It seems that the Find dialog was in fact "opened - just not visible"
because I was able to successfully execute searches (I'd press Ctrl + F, no
dialog would appear, but I could type in something to find and press Enter
and the find operation would be performed. The only screwy thing was that
the dialog was simply not visible.

SO being that I have 3 monitors and and I was by now getting to the mode of
"let's try anything short of reimaging the box" - I resized the Visual
Studio 2005 IDE so that it no longer was maxized, then I moved it to another
monitor, then pressed Ctrl + F - and BINGO! the Find dialog appeared right
in the middle of the IDE window. I then dragged the Visual Studio IDE back
to the original (middle) monitor. Life has been good ever since. The Find
dialog now appears where/when expected.

In my case it was apparently not "off screen" at all (concluded per the
above mentioned test where I ran the Windows app in debug mode and the
dialog appeared right in the middle of the screen). It seems like
*something* was preventing the dialog from becoming visible - right where it
was supposed to paint - in the default middle of the screen location. But
maybe we'll never really know.

Bob

 

[Michael D. Ober]

I've seen this same behavior with Windows message boxes - they sometimes
appear below the window that is requesting them. Therefore, this may not be
a VS bug, but a Windows bug.

Mike Ober.

 

[Ben Voigt]

In my case it was apparently not "off screen" at all (concluded per the
above mentioned test where I ran the Windows app in debug mode and the
dialog appeared right in the middle of the screen). It seems like
*something* was preventing the dialog from becoming visible - right where
it was supposed to paint - in the default middle of the screen location.
But maybe we'll never really know.

Visual Studio remembers window positions separately for edit vs run mode....
most likely your dialog was indeed off-screen.

 

[pfc_sadr]

I tried repair, I tried Windows Update.

I tried a billion different things.

FINALLY I LEFT VISUAL STUDIO AND I WENT BACK TO DREAMWEAVER