I have been having this issue with 1 single project for a year now. I have scoured the web multiple times looking for a solution. So here is how it all came about.
Moved from Vista to Win 7 after a nasty trojan trashed my system. Reinstalled all of the software needed to build the project and left the project in the partition it was already in. At that point when I loaded the project it always starts in debug mode, never release mode.
A few weeks ago my Seagate drive failed due to a bad flash rom version (found out afterwards it was a widespread problem with the 1 TB drives). Fortunately Seagate was nice enough to reflash the rom and I now have my code back. Thanks to Seagate, I got back over 2 years worth of code I had lost (dummy me didn't check to make sure my backups were sent to a different HD, I feel like an idiot for this one since I know better). Well now a new issue has cropped up, none of the windows that were opened will be there when I reload the project. I thought there was a setting for that one but I haven't had any luck in finding it.
This is the only project that behaves this way, unfortunately it is the project I work on the most and it is annoying to have to change it back to release mode every time I start VS and reopen all of the windows again. Does anyone know of a solution to either of these issues? None of my other projects have that problem including ones that are even older than this one.