Some Team System users are complaining about problems with the Team Members feature included in the Team Foundation Server Power Tools – October 2008 Release. For team projects with many members, the load time can be excessive. Other problems have cropped up as well. For instance, one user reported that their Windows Communicator freezes during long TFS operations like “get latest”. Although the Team Members plug-in has some very useful features, you may find that it’s more trouble than it’s worth for your particular situation. In this case, you have two options:

Option 1: Disable the Team Members feature. In the Visual Studio, navigate to Tools –> Options –> Team Foundation Server Power Tools –> General, then set Team Members to False.

This does not remove the Team Members node from your team projects in Team Explorer, but the node no longer does anything. Also, some of the Team Members start-up logic still executes. If this continues to cause problems for you, then try this more drastic fix:

Option 2: Registry hack. This is a more complete way of disabling the TeamMembers feature, but it cannot be done in the Visual Studio IDE.  Using the RegEdit utility, navigate to:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\TeamFoundation\PowerTools

Add a new String Value named TeamTrackerHidden and set its value to True. 

This setting tells the Team Explorer to not load the Team Members plug-in.  This will cause the Team Members node to appear as a folder with a red X on it, which is mildly annoying. However, this option will definitely eliminate any issues you’re having with the Team Members feature.

(Thanks to Bill Essary @ Microsoft for providing these work-arounds)