Floating toolbar for Visual Studio 2003 on Windows 10

Question

We have installed Visual Studio 2003 .NET (and then SP1) on Windows 10 64-bit with dual monitors for support of an older legacy application.

The main Visual Studio (VS) window is displayed on the right monitor. While VS itself works fine, a weird floating toolbar appears in the middle of the desktop on the left (primary) monitor as in the image below.

Title bar icons in the upper right of the main window operate as expected. Icons on the floating toolbar also work (ie. clicking the "X" causes VS to exit). Curiously, if you Minimise and then Restore the main application, the floating toolbar disappears!

Is there any way to stop this strange floating toolbar from appearing (without first minimising and then restoring)?

Answer 1

A separate problem with running 32-bit Visual Studio 2003 .NET on 64-bit Windows 10 relates to Find. Visual Studio hangs and has to be killed via Task Manager. The problem is discussed in this StackOverflow question.

A registry change is required to resolve the above Find problem and which incidentally resolves the floating toolbar issue as well. Copy the code below into a .reg file and merge (but check that the installation path to Visual Studio is correct!).

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

; Disables themes for Visual Studio 2003 .NET
; Note you will have to maximise the window after loading your project
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers]
"C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\\Common7\\IDE\\devenv.exe"="^ RUNASADMIN DISABLEDWM DISABLETHEMES"