Symptom: When saving a file in Visual Studio 2005, the entire IDE becomes non-responsive (ie. freezes) for about 10-15 seconds. Meanwhile, the save icon in the status bar is animated. After 15 seconds, the file is saved and the IDE is responsive again.

Solution: "With the help of a network packet analyzer I was able to find out what stalls Visual Studio. I found that whenever I saved a file, in my web project, Visual Studio did a DNS lookup on a host on my local network. This host was offline so although it managed to resolve it's IP address, there was no response from it. After a timeout period Visual Studio stops trying to connect to this host and goes on with it's business of saving the file.

I searched my registry to find the source of this host name and found it to be present in: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\ProjectMRUList. This registry key is where Visual Studio stores all recent projects that have been opened. In that list a project, located on a remote computer, was found. When I removed that item from the registry, Visual Studio no longer took 20 seconds to save it's Web project files."

[ Slow VS.NET 2005 Editor is driving me nuts - Rick Strahl's Web Log ]

Not only has my IDE been freezing up like crazy when I saved, it was also doing it on a regular basis due to the "auto recover" saving every 7 minutes. This fix has brought my VisualStudio back to where I expected it to be, but just deleting the offending items from this "ProjectMRUList". In my case a project that I loaded remotely off of Nate's laptop, which now that we are working remotely, is no where near me or my home LAN.