At times you’d like to save all the current settings of the Visual Basic environment and restore them afterwards. For example, you may want to alternate between the MDI environment with the code editor using Courier New 12 and the SDI environment with Arial 14. Or you may want to dock a different set of windows, or use different colors for the text highlighted in the code window.

Instead of manually change all these settings any time you run VB, you can use the following trick. Create the VB IDE configuration that meets your requirements, then save it by following this procedure:

1. run the REGEDIT system utility
2. open the HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftVBAMicrosoft Visual Basic key and click over it
3. Export the subtree to a REG file using the Registry | Export Registry File command (ensure that the Selected Branch option is selected). For example you can export to file VBIDE-1.REG
4. open the HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftVisual Basic6.0 key and click over it
5. Export the subtree to a REG file using the Registry | Export Registry File command, using a filename different from the one selected at point 3, for example VBIDE-2.REG

You now have two REG files that account for most of the Visual Basic IDE settings. When you want to restore this configuration, you just have to double-click on both of them, to have all their contents applied to the registry.

If you want to keep everything in one file, you just have to load both files into Notepad, and append the contents of the second file to the first one, after deleting the “REGEDIT 4” string at the beginning of the second file.