I've recently experienced an weird issue with Visual Studio 2019 . The start dialog where you select the projects to open, froze for few seconds every time I opened Visual Studio. I was able to find a workaround, by peeking under the hood of how Visual Studio 2019 keeps the recent project list stored. So here we go: VS 2019 keeps an XML with settings in the following location: %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\16.0_50e1ff9d Note 16.0_50e1ff9d is the current Visual Studio version. Within the XML file, the following node contains a JSON with an array of items, where each item is a description of a recent project you opened: collection   name = "CodeContainers.Offline" > < value   name = "value" >JSON with recent list of projects </ value > Here's an example of an item structure in the JSON: