Recently, I uninstalled Vista and reinstalled XP on my work laptop.  Upon doing so, I had to reinstall all of my developer tools.  One of them was Visual Studio 2005.  Oddly enough, When I installed Firefox I opted to have it run as my default browser (when I was on Vista I had IE).  It didn't occur to me that this would cause any problems.  That was until I started debugging applications.

At first, all seemed fine.  Actually I thought it was going really good because after stopping the debugger, the web page remained open, something that didn't happen with IE.  But, as time went on, I found that my system slowed down once I started debugging anything.  Looking at the processes, I found that Firefox was using about 2 GB's of RAM.  Try sucking that into Visual Studio to debug.  Yeah, that'll cause some slow downs.  

So, I decided that, as much as I like Firefox, I'll set IE as my default browser.  Unfortunately, after doing this, Visual Studio kept debugging with Firefox and causing havoc with my machine.  So, I did a quick search and found this obscure forum thread that explained how to reset Visual Studio's browser.  And it's pretty simple.

First, open a web project.  Find any .aspx page and right click it and select "Browse with.."



There you should see a list of all available browsers plus the built in one.



Select IE from the list and click "Set as Default".



Close either by clicking "Browse" or "Cancel".  It doesn't matter which because the setting has been saved by this point.

Debug your application and notice that IE now opens up.  And much faster I might add.