title: Unable to load the metadata for assembly
body: <p>I'm having a problem with a project in Visual Studio 2010 after moving to a new corporate issued Windows 7 machine (from an aging XP machine).</p>
  
  <p>I copied my projects across to the new machine, but Visual Studio seems to be having problems loading the WPF designer. I have a solution that includes several projects, it builds fine and runs fine, but when I try to open a WPF window in the designer, I get a whole bunch of error messages along the lines of:</p>
  
  <pre><code>"unable to load the metadata for assembly 'Foo'. This assembly may have been 
  downloaded from the web.  See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=179545.  
  The following error was encountered during load: Could not load file or assembly
  'Foo, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its 
  dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified."
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>(Note the link in the error message seems to be no use whatsoever)</p>
  
  <p>I think the problem here is that my corporate IT people have set up Windows 7 machines such that "My Documents" is actually a network drive that is cached locally. This is not a bad thing, because now all my files are backed up whenever I'm on the corporate network, but I think it's upsetting Visual Studio. </p>
  
  <p>Is there a solution to this that doesn't involve abandoning the synched network drive (which I like) and copying everything to the local hard drive (which puts backups back on me).</p>