As far as I understand, the .iws file contains the workspace settings that should not (usually) be added / committed to CVS. Why is it then that IDEA begs me to add it to VCS? For example, I open a project that doesn't contain an IWS file. IDEA creates it automatically and immediately prompts me to add it to VCS. This doesn't make sense to me because in 99% of the cases this is the wrong action. I even seem to recall that at one point IDEA no longer tried to automatically add / commit IWS files, but this regression( ?) has been there at least since 7.0.