Each IDE has its own set of installed extensions. You can see the install location of each Visual Micro installation by looking near the bottom of tools>options>visual micro (assembly location).

I suspect that your earlier install of Microchip Studio, prior to uninstall, retained the Visual Micro extension that you had installed into Microchip Studio. You would rightly expect it to delete the installed extensions during its uninstall, however it doesn't sound like it does that.

Normally it doesn't matter what order IDE's or Visual Micro are installed. In your case your emails suggested that you did not find the "Open With>Visual Studio Version Selector" which is needed, for ease, when you have multiple versions of VS installed. The version selector attempts to select the correct VSIXInstaller.exe for the intended IDE. I also suspect that Microchip Studio which is based on VS2015 will always have its own Open With option because when Microsoft designed the "Version Selector" they did not take into account VS2015 that Microchip is based on. It can be a bit messy but because Microchip studio is so old we don't expect Microsoft to make it easier.

We have not previously heard about any installations of VS2019 or VS2022 that do not provide the "Open With> Version selector" option. Microsoft always appear to add the menu item but failed in your example for some reason.

If the "Open With > Version selector" option is missing an alternative is to "Open With > Browse" and navigate to the IDE location. There can be found the VSIXInstaller.exe for the specific IDE.

I expect that if we add support for xplained hardware debug into VS2022 there will no longer be a need for Microchip Studio. It's on our list to look at.