I've been chasing down this odd Visual Studio bug where the Enter, Backspace, and Arrow keys stop working.

It happened to me in Redmond at Microsoft Campus (of all places!) and it's a known bug that a lot of others have run into apparently. Some folks have noted that it happens with the Beta 2 build, but the link above claims that it is gone from later builds. Sorry, wrong answer, kimo-sabe. Even on the RC build, this showed up.

It has to do with how Visual Studio handles USER SETTINGS. Thanks to a comment in ScottH's blog, I found a command line switch (devenv /resetuserdata) that brought up a user settings dialog asking me to set a profile when I started Visual Studio again. Instead of my usual C# profile, I decided to go with the General profile to mimic VS2003's settings. And whaddaya know? I can actually edit source files (for now). This does not bode well for Visual Studio as a development environment. Things should work by default, right? I can envision answering many questions about this in forums which I am subscribed to.

Goodbye, past coupla days. I'll miss ya.