Don't know how it happened but after the installation of the RC, ALL Visual Studio project templates disappeared with the exception of the AJAX project from the ‘New Project’ wizard.  When I mean all. I all Web projects and also the Windows Forms templates. Note. I also run an English VS on a German XP if that has anything to do with it.

I use VS Professional and have tried executing both devenv /setup and devenv /installvstemplates from the VS command prompt with no sucess. A complete deinstall and reinstall also did not solve the problem.

AFAIK this fine up until the AJAX installation. I'm pretty sure I did a test project yesterday. And this was the only installation this week.

Thanks in advance for any help or advice on how to fix this.

I solved my problem. Sort of.

What I ended up doing was to move the ASPNETAJAXExtensionsXX.zip files out of the ProjectTemplates and then copy the entire %Program Files%\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplatesCache folder from a different computer with a fresh installation. I then copied my versions of the ASPNETAJAXExtensionsXX.zip into the appropriate personal folder (%My Files%\Visual Studio 2005\Templates\ProjectTemplates\xx).

My initial tries which included Uninstallation/Reinstallation on the same computer wasn't enough because this directory seems to remain more or less untouched and I didn't want to spend the time going through the install process again after figuring that out. For some reason regenerating the cache with the (undocumented?) devenv /installvstemplates switch didn't want to do the trick either.

What might have caused this wonderful excursion was the fact that the current AJAX installation manages to place the ASPNETAJAXExtensionsCS.zip not in the Web\CSharp\1033 subdirectory but in the Web root. I suspect the Developer Environment gets minorly grumpy with that choice. MS - You might want to sort that out.