How to stop Visual Studio from moving and/or resizing controls when opening a project?

I have a certain project that's been problematic in visual studio. The main form has a TabControl with four tab pages, and during initial development, the entire contents of the third tab page would shift down each time the project was opened. (It got really bad if you didn't look at that page for a few days, and the next time you ran the program, you had to scroll down past all the blank space that had built up before getting to any content.) That was relatively easy to work around by selecting everything and dragging it back up to the top.

Since the project has gone into maintenance/enhancement mode, the third tab page hasn't had any problems, but several controls on the fourth tab page are being re-sized (a small increase in width) or shifted left (a large decrease in X-position). Again, these same controls are affected each time the project is opened, so if you don't fix them each time, they'll continue to get further away from their correct settings.

The problem description is a lot like this other question; one notable difference is that the designer source file is not changed, i.e., I can open the designer source file in a separate text edit开发者_如何学Pythonor and see the correct values for location and position of all the affected controls, while at the same time I have the project open in Visual Studio and see the incorrect values in the Properties window. (Doing a "Save" or "Save All" doesn't affect the designer source file after just opening the project, but changing anything on the form and then saving it will make the source file match the incorrect values from Visual Studio.)

Any ideas about why Visual Studio is displaying the form incorrectly? I'd really like to avoid having to spend the extra time to fix it every day. And I'm not keen on adding code to the constructor to re-set those properties, as suggested elsewhere (violation of SPOT/DRY rule, you know--fraught with peril).

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You can compare the Designer.vb file of the problem form from one version to the next. (Click Show All Files in Solution Explorer). That should tell you what is being changed and maybe you can find a workaround.

I've had similar problems that were resolved by uninstalling and reinstalling Visual Studio.

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I finally found a way to get around this. When I set the affected form's Minimum Size property in the designer to something other than 0,0 (such as the current size of the form) some of the controls relocate themselves the next time I open the form. Setting Minimum Size back to 0,0 resolves it. The affected controls either have no Anchor setting or have Anchor set to Bottom.

So its seems the combination of Anchor Bottom and non-zero Minimum Size is what makes this unwanted movement happen.