I jumped on Visual Studio one day, into the Team Explorer, and open up a project to find that my “Builds” folder that holds all build definitions was unavailable. Immediately I assumed that the build server was likely down. Time revealed that in fact everything was working fine except my machine. My “Builds” folder was gone and replaced with a “Build” folder with red x in the corner (indicating it was unavailable).

Some Google searches revealed that this is likely a file corruption somehow caused together with the Team Foundation Power Tools. I tried uninstalling the Power Tools and restarting VS without success. Then I found a thread that suggested the only solution was to reset all the user data on the machine (basically is like a fresh install when you start).

I saved down all my settings files in an export, and used the following to reset my machine – then reimport my settings. You will have a bit of work to do to get connected back to TFS, but should only take 5 min before you are back up and running. I never found a solution for this without killing the user data. Please let me know if you find one.

To Restore the Build Node (Visual Studio 2008 & Windows 7):

1. Delete this folder: C:UserstravisAppDataLocalMicrosoftTeam Foundation2.0
2. Run “CMD” as administrator.
3. Run the following command to reset the data (make sure Visual Studio is closed):

            “C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0Common7IDEdevenv.exe” /resetuserdata

            You may have to adjust the path to the devenv.exe accordingly to your system.

1. Start Visual Studio -> it should say preparing system for first time use. Everything is now reset.

Check this out for reference: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/tfssetup/thread/07a54abf-3c48-492f-bda6-53e7dce1d8d1/