Today I discovered why I was having a few hurdles last week.

The IT department pushed the installation of Norton Anti-virus with some Internet controls, whatever the exact name is...

The utility installs itself intrinsically in the operating system. This means it actually transforms a certain number of low level functions to manipulate your data files and check them as soon as they are created.

The potential results are that as your compile files:

1. The file may be found to be locked (Norton locks it to verify it even if the compiler isn't finished.)
2. The file may be removed (quarantined)
3. The operating system may lock up completely (whatever you try doing doesn't work at all at that point; forced reboot is required!)

And I can tell you that if you try to compile a large library such as Qt, it won't work with Norton enabled.

I just uninstalled it since there is another anti-virus already installed (which doesn't interfer with my development work other than making it a bit slower) and I use that machine nearly exclusively for development.

Then the machine worked just fine again. 8-)