Ok, so thanks to a little nudge from Scott Guthrie I figured out what my problem with Intellisense is in Visual Studio 2005. And it turns out the problem is:

SlickRun

SlickRun is a little keyboard shortcut utility that I use to quickly execute various programs. So I have shortcuts for my FTP client, IISRESET, my blog editor, Reflector, SnagIt and a host of other things. I use it a lot and it's a huge timesaver and avoids having too many damn desktop shortcuts.

Well, it turns out that when running SlickRun (which runs as a startup application that is always active) I run into the Intellisense problem that I’ve been bitching about here so much for ASP.NET pages:

• Intellisense for WebForm controls doesn’t work
• Until I open the Visual Designer
• Tooltips and other ‘hover’ operations behave odd -  pop up quickly and go away

So after a note from Scott to check for Anti-virus etc. I turned off everything that was running (which isn’t much on my system) and sure enough the problem went away. I started adding things back in and once SlickRun was added things stopped working again.

It turns out that SlickRun has a ‘Chase Cursor’ feature that is used to allow popping up SlickRun next to the current mouse position and that’s apparently what is causing the problem. Once I turned off that feature and used a fixed position for SlickRun to pop up I’m good to go.

I’m glad that SlickRun can work at all – it’d be pretty hard to give up SlickRun at this point since I use it so much during the course of the day to access various utilities.