>I'm pretty sure those settings are global and just part of the VS environment, but if you have other instances of VS open when you make the change, I wouldn't be surprised if when you closed them all the next time you open VS it will have the settings of the last VS you closed. Just to be sure I opened a single instance of VS, make the change and then save it and close that instance. After that it will be easy to tell if it is changed in everything you open, but I think it will ( I believe there is a (Global) by the setting )
This one is tricky. The only way I could have it to work is to close all instances but one before making the changes. If I have five instances loaded and apply the change to one, the other ones will simply reset the environment, affected by the order of closing sequence. So, to be safe, I had to close everything, load up one only, apply the change and close it. Then, I was able to load all projects and have it ok.
However, I am not sure it was related to that. The hot key was directing to a page in IE as about:InPrivate. Do you know anything about that IE page?