Thanks to Steven for his great comments about VS Settings.

The upcoming Import/Export feature actually does allow you to import from a vssettings file that lives out on the web.  So you should be able to post your favorite vssettings file on a website and then load it onto any machine with VS Whidbey.

One thing we haven't enabled is setting a file on the web as your auto-sync file.  This would definitely be a cool feature, especially if it was fully integrated through the use of a Microsoft-supplied web service.  And, as you point out, there would be tremendous opportunity for datamining to determine what our default settings should be in the future.  Unfortunately I don't think we'll be able to provide this functionality in Whidbey, though.  I know there would be lots of security/privacy concerns, even if it was an opt-in feature.  And building a feature that involves interaction with a web service is probably too expensive to do at this point in the product cycle.  It's actually not terribly complicated from a development perspective, but there is a significant test cost associated with it as well.  I'm going to think about this a little bit though; I'd like to ensure that some interface hooks exist that would let a 3rd party create a package and some web services to enable this scenario.