I was experiencing a rather odd problem, where settings saved in my application would only show up with their saved value, if it was started from within the Visual Express IDE. If I browse to the Debug folder and execute the application through the Explorer or executing it from the prompt, then the saved values were not available.
After playing around a bit, I found out that if I save settings in the IDE, then they are not available when executing the application directly. So, I had to start the application from the explorer, save the settings, restart it and finally they were available.
How come those two ways don't share their settings The IDE is also executing the file from the Debug dir afaik, so I was surprised to experience this behaviour.