Question: Is there any way to restart Visual Studio 2010 (and possibly 2008 as well but not so important) manually and keeping the current state (i.e. all open solutions/projects and files)? Basically the same operation as when you install an extension and Visual Studio asks to restart itself. Occasionally Visual Studio gets confused after things like folder renames/moves, reference changes or the GUI editor throws a wobbly so it would be nice to be able to quickly restart the solution/project rather than close Visual Studio, reopen it and load the solution/project again.

Answer: 
I don't really like answering my own question but I found the [RestartStudio](http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/f27f5495-3987-4e0f-8ce3-9a95efc05ce0) extension for Visual Studio 2010 that adds the restart option to the File menu and seems to work well.
[Visual Studio Restart](https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/01f0a1ae-1513-48dd-9cf0-efb38419b480) is another plugin that works for Visual Studio 2013.

[Restart Visual Studio](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MarioHsiao.RestartVisualStudio) for 2015

[VSRestart2017](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vs-publisher-356819.VSRestart2017) for 2017

[Visual Studio Restart](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=PaulMelia.VsRestart001) for 2017 & 2019

[Restart for Visual Studio 2022 Preview](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=pedoc.RestartVisualStudioforvs2022preview) for 2022