Reputation: 72524

Why does my VB6 IDE loses its buttons and menu items?

I still have to use the VB6 IDE.

Unfortunately every time I start the IDE one of the buttons of the toolbar disappears. Almost always it's the Run button which goes first. Sometimes also items from the menu bar or the context menus are missing.

I have to reset the toolbars almost every time I start the IDE (Which is quite often during a typical work day). Recently I bought an IDE plugin which modifies the menu bar and requires a restart after every reset of the menu bar. (Otherwise it would crash)

I could live with just the resetting, but the restart is really annoying.

Is there something I can do?

Upvotes: 3

Answers (10)

Mike

Reputation: 11

If you're still using the VB6 IDE, and I do amongst others, then this problem is not likely to have gone away. I use VB6 in Windows 10, and the problem is still there. But it doesn't affect me anymore.

I have had this problem a few years into using VB5 and VB6. Today, if I start VB6 directly, it may work fine the first time, but buttons will go missing the second time -- ALWAYS.

My solution, which I developed from day one:

Do whatever needs to be done to restore all your buttons. Save the Visual Basic 6.0 registry settings to a file, as suggested previously, and only keep the UI entry. Sometimes, you have to exit VB6 for it to post changes to the registry. So if this doesn't work the first time, try exiting before saving the settings.

I use my own program to launch VB6, which automatically copies my VB6 registry backup back into the registry -- by calling "RegEdit.exe /S D:\VB\IDE_Fix.reg" -- before I launch the IDE . This works every single time, and requires no action on my part.

If you read this, that means you are a programmer. You can make this work by yourself.

Mike

Upvotes: 1

Bruce Munck

Reputation: 31

The 'Find' button disappeared from my VB6 toolbar forcing me to select the Edit menu to use Find. I had two add-ins enabled: vbCodePrint and ResourceEditor; so I did away with both of them, turned VB6 off and back on, then put both add-ins back in and my button returned.

Upvotes: 1

Roberto Cagnetta

Reputation: 51

To solve this problem:

Unload all add-ins.
Right-click on a toolbar and select the Customize... menu.
For each toolbar click the Reset... button (6 times in total).
Reload the add-ins.

For me action 3 was enough.

cf. MZTools faq (thanks to Andrea Bonafini), but these steps are originally from MSDN

Upvotes: 5

Robin

Reputation: 171

How to restore your VB6 IDE without reinstalling:

Run Regedit
Find the entry for Visual Basic 6.0
Export your settings in case things go wrong
Delete the 'UI' setting
Run VB and you will have your popup menus back

Upvotes: 1

Daniel Rikowski

Reputation: 72524

I've tracked down the problem and as suggested it was an add-in.

The problem went away as soon as I disabled the Visual Basic 6 Resource Editor.

Upvotes: 1

raven

Reputation: 18135

It sounds like you recently bought a bad add-in. Can you get your money back? Every time I've had problems with disappearing controls in the IDE it has been due to a bad add-in. You can find out which one it is by disabling them, one by one, each time using the IDE for a while, then re-enable it and disable the next one, until the problem stops.

I still use one problematic add-in. It exhibits behavior similar to yours in that it makes the run button disappear. I avoid the problem by only loading the add-in when I need it, use it (it formats code), then I immediately unload it. If you don't use the functionality of the add-in that often, this could be an acceptable workaround.

Upvotes: 3

Bobwise

Reputation: 702

I had a similar problem when I was setting up the IDE to use for the first time, though it may not be helpful if you've been using the same IDE for a while. When I first started using the IDE, I would modify the toolbars and then close the IDE. When prompted if I wanted to save the open file I always said No, since the file was just a dummy file I was using to open the IDE with. Turns out the IDE was saving the toolbar preferences with that file, so they never got saved.

Try opening a file, customizing the UI, saving the file, then closing without modifying the code. This was the solution for me.

Upvotes: 1

melaos

Reputation: 8428

Yea, i have this same problem with one of the add-in. But if you reset it. Shut the IDE down and open it back up again without doing anything, the IDE shouuld be able to retain the previous clean setup.

Upvotes: 2