Weird Behavoir? Clean Your Cache...
I was working late last night on one of those mysterious problems. Too late... I was editing a working, managed smart tag that refused to work after edits. Simply, it refuse to open an XML file that I wanted to use for a list of recognizer terms. First, of course I checked my syntax (eleven+ times), fearing that I had bobbled things up once again. Then I blamed it on VS security... anyone who works with that knows it can play tricks especially in Interop with Office. Nothing worked! So finally, I ported the code to another machine. Worked - of course my code was good; it was just some simple changes. So with it 'working' I then ported the same code back to the original machine. It didn't work again! Further frustrated, I built a new project on that same machine and it worked! Now besides thinking corrupt project I started to think... hey is thing somehow stuck with remnants of my original project mixed with my new one? What could this be? Then it hit me.... ASSEMBLY CACHE. Great friend of performance; less of a friend to the unsuspecting developer.
So the moral of the story is simple, if you are experiencing issues that really shouldn't be happening in VS.NET, purge your assembly cache and see if that helps. It is (commonly) located in the C:\Documents and Settings\<User Name>\Local Settings\Application Data\assembly\dl2 and you can simply delete the whole thing to clear out the cache.