A piece of code I recently worked with required data structures that hold unique, sorted data elements. The requirement for the data being both sorted and unique came from it being fed into std::set_intersection() so using an std::set seemed to be an obvious way of fulfilling these requirements. The code did fulfill all the requirements but I found the performance somewhat wanting in this particular implementation (Visual Studio 2008 with the standard library implementation shipped by Microsoft). The main problem was is that this code is extremely critical to the performance of the application and it simply wasn’t fast enough at this point.

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.