Error 'LINK : fatal error LNK1123: failure dur

Question

I've installed Visual Studio 2012 Release Preview, and it appears to be fine, but now when I try to use Visual Studio 2010 to compile C++ projects, I get the following error message:

LINK : fatal error LNK1123: failure during conversion to COFF: file invalid or corrupt

I'm not 100% sure of this, but it seems to be related to projects that have .rc (resource) files in them.

I've tried repairing Visual Studio 2010 from Add/Remove programs and rebooting, but this has no effect.

I also get the same error if I use Visual Studio 2012 RC to compile the C++ projects when set to use the Visual Studio 2010 toolset. Upgrading to the Visual Studio 2011 toolset fixes the problem (but of course I don't want to do this for production code).

Update: I've uninstalled Visual Studio 2012, rebooted, and the problem still persists! Help!

Answer 1

+1 to user Short for an answer that worked for me!

I tried to do some debugging of this with msbuild /v:diag, and I'm seeing that MSBuild is trying to embed a manifest in the executable, with <somename>.dll.embed.manifest.res on the linker command line, where that is a resource file built from <somename>.dll.embed.manifest. But the manifest file is an empty Unicode text file. (That is, a two-byte file with the Unicode 0xFEFF prefix)

So the root problem seems to have something to do with that manifest file not being generated, or it being used when <somename>.dll.intermediate.manifest should have been used.

An alternate solution seems to be to turn off the "Embed Manifest" option under Properties, Manifest Tool, Input and Output.

Answer 2

I set Enable Incremental Linking to "No (/INCREMENTAL:NO)" and it doesn't work for me.

Next I've changed:

Project Properties 
   -> Configuration Properties 
       -> General
          -> Platform Toolset -> "Visual Studio 2012 (v110)"

and it works for me :)

Answer 3

It's because of .NET Framework 4.5 is replacing .NET Framework 4.0. I uninstalled Visual Studio 2010 several times with no luck. When I removed .NET Framework 4.5 and reinstalled Visual Studio 2010 it went fine.

See Uninstall Visual Studio 11 completely to do a fresh install.

Answer 4

I had the same problem with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and it was solved by the method described in this youtube video

The video suggests to rename the file cvtres.exe in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\bin (in my Win7X64 matchine) to cvtres-old.exe

Answer 5

My problem was that I've had two paths on my PC that contained the same libraries. Both paths were added to the Additional Library Directories in Configuration Properties -> Linker -> General. Removing one of the paths solved the problem.

Answer 6

If you have installed Visual Studio 2012 RC, then it installed .NET 4.5 RC.

Uninstall .NET 4.5 RC, and install the version you need (4.0 for VS 2010). This should clear up any problems you are having.

This solved the same problem. There is no need to uninstall Visual Studio.