Unable to see the Project/Web Site link in the Start Page of Visual Studio 2005

I remember I had worked with a customer on a support incident long way back wherein VS 2005 was not displaying links for Open and Create for Projects and Websites as shown in the screenshot below:

In Visual Studio 2005 we were unable to see the Web Site or the Project link in the Start Page as shown below:

Open:    Project... | Web Site...... }

Create:  Project... | Web Site...... }

The links were not getting displayed in Visual Studio 2005, although Customer had created multiple Websites and projects through VS 2005.

-- Finally we figured out that there is a set of registry entries which contains the values for the Start Page of the VS2005.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Start Page
-- I compared the Registry values on the customer's box with mine and found that in the above Registry hive, all the MRUCommand<n>GUID, where <n> == 1, 2, 3, 4 were set to 0 on customer's box unlike that of mine.
Also MRUCommand<n>ID, where <n> == 1,2,3,4 were set to 0 on customer's box.

We took a backup of the registry Keys, and manually modified the above keys from a working instance of VS 2005 on a different machine:
All the values within () are in Decimal.
                        

Name/Value                                                                                                                                  Type                         

DownloadState      (1)                                                                                                      (REG_DWORD)
MRUCommand1GUID    {5EFC7975-14BC-11CF-9B2B-00AA00573819}                                        (REG_SZ)
MRUCommand1ID   (216)                                                                                                   (REG_DWORD)
MRUCommand2GUID    {5EFC7975-14BC-11CF-9B2B-00AA00573819}                                        (REG_SZ)
MRUCommand2ID   (321)                                                                                                   (REG_DWORD)
MRUCommand3GUID    {C7547851-4E3A-4E5B-9173-FA6E9C8BD82C}                                        (REG_SZ)
MRUCommand3ID   (43)                                                                                                     (REG_DWORD)
MRUCommand4GUID    {C7547851-4E3A-4E5B-9173-FA6E9C8BD82C}                                         (REG_SZ)
MRUCommand4ID   (44)                                                                                                     (REG_DWORD)

Something like this:

-- Closed the VS 2005 and reopened it and voila, it had the links for the "Web site..."  and "Project..." as desired.

I did some research and found that this article will also be handy for any customizations in VS 2005

 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/320851

Hope this helps!

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