Unable to Access the Properties Window in Visual Studio

I had my part of frustration when I fond I could not get hold of the Properties Window in Visual Studio 2005. No matter whether I tried bringing up the window by accessing the menu entry or using the key combination, I could not see the window even though the current view seemed to be switching focus to a new window.
This had to be something about settings, because when I was running a debugging session, the Properties window would be displayed.
I had two hypotheses, with the help of Spy++. I could see the window listed under Visual Studio 2005 in Spy++ so it had to be somewhere.
Inspecting the properties of the Visual Studio 2005 'Properties' window, I got:

So:
1. The window is either off screen and/or
2. The window is of zero width as shown in the rectangle properties.

I tried locating registry settings to specify the location and/ or dimension of the Properties window, but without success.
My solution was to restore Visual Studio's settings for C# development environment (which I spend most of my time in) and this restored the views of all windows to default and now I can access the Properties window as before. ( see this Microsoft How To for details on how to restore your settings)

The new Window Properties in Spy++ now look like this:

After I wrote this post I found this blog entry suggesting a solution for the situation when the 'Properties' window is off screen.