As I was working in Visual Studio today I had a problem with AQtime which I just installed. More or less, AQtime attempts to read the file that you're just writing and at the time you try to save the manifest in the output, it fails because AQtime has the .exe open in Read Only mode.

To fix the problem I simple said don't generate the manifest, which seemed the be the right solution. That made the compilation work great, but then AQtime would not be able to start the executable. Seemingly nothing would happen (i.e. type F5, made sure the parameters were fine, click Run, AQtime and the IDE would get ready to launch the executable, and NOTHING.)

Why? Well... The result of not including the manifest was to get errors at startup. The operating system, all of a sudden, could not find the corresponding CRT files. (MFC80U.dll, MSVCM80.dll, MSVCP80.dll, and MSVCR80.dll.) Unfortunately, when that happens the IDE silently returns back to normal instead of letting you know that an error occured.

We tried to install the right .DLL files in the .exe folder but the executable was not happy about it. The manifest would indicate to the operating system which runtime libraries to use but I have no clue how to determine that manually!

Anyhow, putting the manifest option back to Yes (use it) fixed that problem. In order to avoid problems with AQtime, however, I also went in their settings and turned off the Auto-reload debugging information feature. I'm not too sure why that's on anyway since they really only need those when you start running your program (could be they also use them when showing reports.)