I've had an issue on two computers (my primary development machine and a virtual pc dev box) which I was finally able to solve today after many hours of frustrated searching and experimenting.  Interestingly, this issue only affected my two machines, but not those of a co-worker.  What was more peculiar was that I have higher privileges in TFS.  The issue revolved around getting the Team Foundation Server Team Explorer 2008 to recognize our automated builds.

Within Visual Studio 2008's Team Explorer pane I am able to browse all work items, documents, reports, etc, but not builds.  In fact, the node shows up with a red 'X' icon and is mislabeled 'Build' rather than the correct 'Builds'.

I attempted to fix it by uninstalling / reinstalling the TFS 2008 Power Tools (July Release), repairing my VS2008 installation, disabling my firewall, disabling my antivirus.  I tried digging into various configuration files and renaming / deleting my cache folder to no avail.

Ultimately, to fix the issue I had to resort to resetting my Visual Studio settings to their factory settings.  To do this, I did the following:

1. Renamed/Deleted by TFS Cache folder.  On my Vista machine it's found in (C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Team Foundation\2.0).
2. Reset Visual Studio 2008 settings by typing devenv /resetuserdata from the command line.