Failure during conversion to COFF: file invalid or

Question

When I try building just a simple program into VS2010, compiling succeeds yet when I try to build the solution it gives me this error:

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

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

I am using Visual Studio 2010.

This happened to me when I installed .NET 4.5. Uninstall of .NET 4.5 and install of .NET 4.0 helped me and error messages disappeared.

Answer 2

Had to install VS 2010 SP1 in order to get it to work again for myself. Lame microsoft.

Answer 3

I had this issue and I solved it with this thread

disable incremental linking, by going to

    Project Properties 
       -> Configuration Properties 
           -> Linker (General) 
              -> Enable Incremental Linking -> "No (/INCREMENTAL:NO)"

Answer 4

This issue occurred after Visual Studio 2012 installation. The issue resolved by replacing the cvtres.exe from VS2010 with the one from VS2012.

Thank you to "social.msdn"!

Answer 5

If you have installed VS2012 as well, the old cvtres file will no longer work.

Try removing the file (I simply renamed):
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\BIN\cvtres.exe

You can also debug using the /VERBOSE linker option in order to get more information regarding the linker error. There you should see an error message that the invoke to cvtres fails.

Answer 6

Do you have Visual Studio 2012 installed as well? If so, 2012 stomps your 2010 IDE, possibly because of compatibility issues with .NET 4.5 and .NET 4.0.

See http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/da-DK/vssetup/thread/d10adba0-e082-494a-bb16-2bfc039faa80