I'm going nuts trying to simply work with xml file in Visual Studio 2005. If I create a new *.xml file and add it to the project then a gray screen gets displayed instead of the file contents. This screen shows the message "This XML document is not well formed. It contains the following error: Root element is missing". It seems like the XML tools build into Visual Studio 2005 have hijacked this file and it's now impossbile to simply look at the file and manipulate like any other text based file. There is a clunky work around where I do a right click open it with HTML editor. I'm able to work with XML files with no such problems on my machine at work which has Visual Studio 2008.