Since a few weeks I have had this infuriating problem. Whenever I start VS it opens an empty environment. I tried to change that in Options > Environment > Startup from "Empty environment" to "Start window". After pressing "OK" I restarted VS completely and reopened it. Again: a new empty environment opens.
After reinstalling VS several times now I gave up and want to know, if someone had a similar problem and knows a fix for this problem.
Visual Studio Enterprise 2019 (16.8.3)
Installed Workloads from VS-Installer:
Additional Extensions:
*all the extensions are up-to-date
After MONTHS I finally found a solution. I basically tried to uninstall all extensions and discovered that this issue only occurs while ReSharper is installed. I didn't find anything regarding this on the internet, therefore I searched all of the options and I finally found the issue!
If you have the same issue and have ReSharper installed (currently 2020.3.3) open Visual Studio and go to Extensions/ReSharper/Options. A new window will pop up. Then navigate to Environment/Performance Guide and under the group Visual Studio preferences affecting performance you'll find the item Show empty environment at startup. Set it from Fix Silently to Ignore. Click Save and close this window.
Additionally, you have reset the specific Visual Studio option. Therefore open Tools/Options and navigate to Environment/Startup and set the On startup, open: to Start window. Click OK and restart Visual Studio to check if the Start Window now gets displayed correctly.