Even though I am using .NET as my primary platform I do still make use of PHP 5 and since I have come to like using Visual Studio so much, I use an add-in called VS.PHP from JCX Software.

Recently I tried out the newest version (2.4) which support Visual Studio 2008 and after the trial ran out I removed it however for whatever reason it interfered with my Visual Studio 2005 configuration and prevented the add-in from working at all.

The error I was receiving when trying to load a VS.PHP project was:

The application for project '<path to project>' is not installed.
 Make sure the application for the project type (.phpproj) is installed. 

After about 40 minutes of head scratching and googling (as well as a re-install of VS.PHP) I encountered the following solution on the JCX Software Forums:

Run devenv /resetskippkgs

I did exactly that, I navigated a command prompt to:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE

And ran the command above.

I should explain that the reason I was receiving the error (well more why it wasn’t even loading VS.PHP) was because 2.4 conflicted with 2.3 and when I launched VS2005 again I got the VS error telling me an add-in failed to load and would I like to prevent it from loading on future launches of Visual Studio. I stupidly replied “Yes, please do”.

The command work, VS went back to normal and now I have VS refusing to store the window positions in upon application close in Vista. The two are unrelated but it doesn’t exactly help me any.

I have moved to XP for the time being until I have the time to fix the VS2005 install on Vista.