How to stop Visio 2007 toolbars from rearranging when I open ShapeSheet?

Question

(With edits italicized) I normally run with one VSD open, maximized within the Visio 2007 window. I have a mix of custom and standard toolbars, all moved onto one row:

Note that I have lots of buttons, so most of the time not all of them are visible because my Visio window is too narrow.

However, about a third of the time, when I right-click on a shape and open the ShapeSheet and then click back to the drawing window with the ShapeSheet window still open, the toolbars expand to full width and stagger themselves across multiple rows:

How can I stop that from happening?

Environment: Visio 2007 SP3 32-bit running on Win 8.1 Enterprise 64-bit. Behaviour is not 100% consistent, but does happen in multiple VSD files.

Edit: If I leave the ShapeSheet open, click back to the document, and rearrange the fixed toolbars, it sticks for a little while while I try opening and closing the file, and exiting and restarting Visio. It then eventually goes back to staggering.

I ran one test in which I (starting with Visio not running):

1. Opened a file by double-clicking it in Explorer;
2. Right-clicked on the group that is the only top-level shape on the sheet and selected ShapeSheet;
3. Clicked back to the document MDI window in Visio to see how the toolbars were arranged;
4. Exited Visio by clicking the close box on the title bar; and
5. Repeated the above about ten times for the same Visio file.

During the test, the toolbars periodically rearranged themselves, sometimes staggered and sometimes in other arrangements.

I ran the test above both windowed (window too narrow for all buttons) and maximized (window definitely wide enough for all buttons) and saw the same results: sometimes the toolbars come back in a different place than where I left them.

Answer 1

You can't stop them from rearranging. In fact they are not being rearranged, Visio changes the toolbars that are visible when the shapesheet editor is opened. However, the 2 layouts can be controlled independently, so just rearrange the toolbars as you want to see them while the shapesheet editor is open.