Visual Assist build 2114 and newer
By default, the tip-of-the-day dialog that appears during startup of the IDE is modeless (non-modal) so a solution can load while tips are viewed. If you experience an anomaly with the behavior, you run it on the UI thread, thereby making it modal, by creating the following BINARY value in the registry:
HKCU\Software\Whole Tomato\Visual Assist X\ModalTipOfTheDay = 01
Set the value to 00 to return to default behavior, i.e. non-modal on a background thread.