I have a client that swears he is diligent when it comes to not opening a bunch of views when working in Revit.  He kept telling me that Revit was automatically opening views on him.  In this case both of his statements were true.  A little known feature of Revit it the capability to “Replicate” a window.

This feature has been there for a long time and I can honestly say I don’t think I have ever seen anyone use this tool.  Yet the help file describes it nicely:     This tool is useful if you want to pan and zoom on certain areas of the design, while also viewing the entire design in another window. (Use the Tile tool to see both views at the same time.) Any changes that you make to the project in the new window also display in other windows of the project

It keeps users from having to duplicate or create multiple views in order to work and see multiple parts of a model.  I personally have used this feature, not frequently but effectively.

In this case the quirk came into play when my client was working in a sheet with the a view activated, this also happened to be the only thing open in the project.  Then while editing a family the “Load into Project” button was used.  Since Revit could see the user was in a view but the sheet was open it Replicated the active view.  While he kept editing the family and hitting reload, each time a replicated view was created, thus causing him to have 15 additional views open.  In a larger project the only way to recognize this easily is by the view name, it will have the view name followed by a : then number i.e. Floor Plan Level 1:15

Hopefully now you will understand while there are View Gremlins in your Revit project opening up excessive views, or at least the ones with the :## in the name.