This has been driving me nutty for years in C#...

...but I finally figured out how to prevent the damn Visual Studio IDE from inserting asterisks into EVERY DAMN LINE of comments I put in a C# file (guess I should have Googled this.)

Simply disable:

Text Editor > C# > Advanced > Generate XML documentation comments for ///

I know, bizarrely unobvious considering there are a myriad of settings for comment templates where you basically specify 'do not do anything when I create a comment' which are blithely ignored by this #$)(#@$* setting.

I hope this makes someone else's day better like it did mine :).