TFS & Visual Studio ALM – by Neno Loje

When starting Visual Studio it automatically tries to connect to your TFS, which can be very annoying if you work offline. You will probably see:

TF30331: Team Explorer could not connect to the Team Foundation server …

You can turn this auto-connect behavior off by setting the following files in the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\TeamFoundation
"AutoLoadServer" = 0

Zero means do not reconnect automatically. 

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/hippietim/archive/2006/03/14/551320.aspx

Downside: you now always have to manually connect (from Team Explorer’s toolbar)

P.S. The Team Foundation Power Tools (TFPT) include a feature called Tweak UI which offers a checkbox to set this registry key – however in the October 2008 version it has a bug (creaing a string value instead of DWORD) and therefore will not work.