In Dreamweaver CS3, a feature was introduced to allow CSS style rendering to be turned OFF in Design View:
View > Style Rendering > Display Styles
This allows you to quickly view the semantic structure of a page. It's also helpful when marking up or editing content inside elements that are not accessible in Design View for whatever reason.
Originally, this setting persisted until changed. But, many users turned off this setting without knowing what it was, and later would go crazy trying to figure out why their styles weren't rendering. So starting in CS4, this setting is always reset to ON when DW is restarted (which is a natural action to take when things don't make sense).
You can change it to default to OFF as follows:
1. Place the following code in a file called myStartup.htm :
<html> <head> <script language="JavaScript"> dw.cssStylePalette.setDisplayStyles(false); </script> </head> <body> </body> </html>
2. Place a copy of this file in the Configuration/Startup folder so that it gets executed every time you start DW.
Notice that I gave it a generic name in case you want to add any other commands to be executed at every startup.
