(*) "High" as in "more than 96"

I have a frustrating issue with VS2008 on my Vista machine, but luckily I found a solution.

Here's the issue: As long as my Windows DPI settings are set to the default of 96 DPI, everything is fine.  But when I set the DPI settings higher, things start to go wrong.  With “wrong” I mean:

• Some fonts in the IDE are larger than others
• Popup menus appear in the wrong place, sometimes partly outside the screen area
• Intellisense menus appear at seemingly random positions all over the screen
• Team Explorer is only useable with keyboard commands, since mouse-clicks and mouse-hovers arrive at wrong places on screen.

The frustrating thing is that for a non-WPF application, the “old” VS2005 behaved surprisingly well at higher DPI settings.  Somehow MS screwed this up with Orcas.

This means: VS2008 is practically unusable on the notebook screen of my Dell Inspiron M65, which has a 150 DPI panel.  My Samsung 204B external monitor has a 100 DPI panel, but using a 96 DPI setting makes everything small.  In fact, I like to use a setting of 120 DPI to give letters a comfortable size.

And now for the solution: buried within a comment on an entry from Scott Guthrie's blog, a fellow calling himself Deepak gives a solution: disable display scaling:

Turning off display scaling (from right click devenv -> properties -> compatibility tab in Vista) brings back things to normal.

And sure enough, when I modified my VS2008 shortcut according to these instructions, most (if not all) of my issues seem to have disappeared.