Try stopping mspdbsrv.exe (the process that generates the pdb files during a build) if it is still running. My understanding is that it’s supposed to shut down at the end of the compilation but it seems that it can turn into a zombie process and if the latter happens, you can get the above error when linking your binaries.

Anyway, I just ran into this issue and stopping the process via the Task Manager resolved the issue for me.

I’m currently busy porting a large native C++ project from VS2008 to VS2010 and one of the issues I keep running into was build times. The VS2008 build uses a distributed build system; Unfortunately the vendor doesn’t support VS2010 yet, so I couldn’t use the same infrastructure. In order to get a decent build speed, I started exploring MSBuild’s ability to build projects in parallel (which is fairly similar to VS2008’s ability to build projects in parallel) and the C++ compiler’s ability to make use of multiple processors/cores, aka the /MP switch.

Thud, thud, thud…

The sound of the developer’s head banging on the desk late at night.

What happened? Well, I had a requirement to make use of some smart pointers to handle a somewhat complicated resource management issue that was mostly being ignored in the current implementation, mainly on the grounds of it being slightly to complicated to handle successfully using manual pointer management. The result - not entirely unexpected - was a not so nice memory leak.