This has got to be the most pointless setting in Visual Studio. I can’t imagine why any reasonable person would want to hide the solution. Maybe it is for those “Morts” I keep hearing about who bundle everything into one giant ball of mud project so have no need to know about mundane things such as solutions.
I suppose what gets me most is that I like my right-click. I like to right-click on things and get context sensitive menus. I also normally create a new blank solution then add projects to it. The solution disappear when the number of projects equals one. When there are zero projects the solution shows, but as soon as I add one it disappears so I can’t right-click and add another until I sort this setting out. It was the same in Visual Studio 2005, I was hopping they might have changed the default for VS2008, but no – the mob rule of the Morts wins.
Yes, I realise that I can go to the file menu to add a new project from there, but if I’m already focused in the solution explorer, I want to stay there. I don’t want to make giant leaps across the screen to do these things. I want everything I need within easy reach.
The Blog of Colin Mackay 
Keyboard shortcuts Colin! Keyboard shortcuts!:)
@Edward: Colin is a right mouse click “mort” so doesn’t know about keyboard shortcuts! He only wishes he could turn off that damn keyboard thing, but the MS VS team seem to keep it switched on by default. Damn those key tappers :-P.
@John I know a fair few keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl-Z for undo (I use that quite a lot)… Ummm… Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up the login dialog….Seriously, I used to have a lot of keyboard shortcuts set up the way I liked them. Heck, I used to remap my keyboard for certain things (foreign characters mostly)The problem with all that is that if you move around machines a lot it becomes difficult to keep the same mappings (especially if you are doing it at the keyboard driver level), so I just learned to use the mouse more as that was more consistent. I could have learned the default key shortcuts, but many of them seem to get moved around from time to time and I just gave in to the futility of it all.I used to be (and this is going back about 10 years) a key-chording emacs nutter.