Todd asks, in comments to my last post, whether there is any way to migrate or save your settings (window layouts et al) in VS.NET between installations/machines/etc. he also asks if how the developers at microsoft handle this.

unfortunately, the answer is that "no" there isn't any good way to save settings across machines or installations in VS.NET 2002 or 2003. there may be some special registry entries and magic files on disk and secret handshake and.. <whatever> that will get you there, but frankly, the work of finding all that out just doesn't seem worthwhile. i suppose you could also write a VS macro that would set most of these options, but honestly i've never explored this possibility.

developers here (that is, the ones that actually use VS) generally fall into two camps with regards to this:
camp one, to which i belong, find it irritating but have gotten used to reconfiguring every time they install a new version. (you think this is irritating for you, imagine how bad that is for those of us who work on VS and install a new version every week or so!)
camp two has just learned to live with the default settings. personally, i'm not sure how anyone could stand to do this, but people apparently manage...  :)

whidbey does include a new feature that allows you the ability to export your settings and re-import them. while it doesn't support every possible setting available, hopefully it gets most of them. to be perfectly honest, i have not been able to use this feature successfully (due to the unstable nature of day-to-day builds) and am still resorting to setting all my options manually each time i install a new VS.

Todd, i hope that at least answers your question, even if it wasn't the answer you wanted to hear.