Visual Studio crashing after full rebuild of solution

[Daniel Deptford]

Hello there,

We're having a some problems with Visual Studio 2003 at the moment. In a
nutshell, devenv.exe terminates when trying to run our application after a
full rebuild. After trying to track this down using Filemon.exe (from
www.sysinternals.com) and debugging devenv.exe (in developer studio )
using the Microsoft symbols (from the MS Symbol server), it appears that it
crashes in mspdb71.dll when doing a full dependency check.

It appears to crash when going through the dependency tree of the
compiler-generated .idb file. A partial callstack is listed below:

mspdb71.dll!NMT::find() + 0x38

mspdb71.dll!NMT::addNiForSz() + 0x17
mspdb71.dll!NMP::getNi() + 0x4c
mspdb71.dll!MRE::NiFromName() + 0x12
mspdb71.dll!MRE::EnumSrcFiles() + 0x4d
VCProjectEngine.dll!CBldMreDependencies::GetDependencies() + 0x6d
VCProjectEngine.dll!CVCCLCompilerTool::GetDependencies() + 0x15a
VCProjectEngine.dll!CBldToolWrapper::GetDependencies() + 0x38
VCProjectEngine.dll!CBldAction::ScanDependencies() + 0x4e
VCProjectEngine.dll!CBldAction::UpdateDepInfo() + 0x29
VCProjectEngine.dll!CBldFileDepGraph::EnumerateBuildActionsI() - 0x132
VCProjectEngine.dll!CBldFileDepGraph::EnumerateBuildActionsI() + 0xa4
VCProjectEngine.dll!CBldFileDepGraph::RetrieveBuildActions() + 0xdb
VCProjectEngine.dll!CDynamicBuildEngine::HasBuildState() + 0xb0
VCProjectEngine.dll!CConfiguration:oUpToDateCheck() + 0x16c
VCProjectEngine.dll!CConfiguration::get_UpToDate() + 0x16
VCProject.dll!CGenCfg::StartUpToDateCheck() + 0x1f
msenv.dll!CSlnUpdate::HrProjsUpToDate() + 0xe8601
msenv.dll!CSlnUpdate::HrBeginSlnUpdate() + 0x134

Another odd thing is that we don't actually have "Enable Minimal Rebuild"
turned on for the project. I was under the impression that .IDB files were
not generated if this option was not enabled.

This project exists in a solution of around 13 other projects (our dependant
libraries), and is the main start-up project (checking the output from
filemon confirms that other .IDB files have been opened by devstudio, so it
would appear that this is the only one). This bug appears when doing a full
rebuild using Visual Studio and Incredibuild 2.03. Deleting the .IDB file
solves the problem, but this is a hassle, considering the amount of times we
need to do a full rebuild.

We use Perforce as our source code control system and make extensive use of
it's branching technology. It's worth pointing out that this does not
happen in the main codeline, but only in a branch (it's happened in 4
separate branches now).

If anyone could give any pointers on this, I'd be very grateful

Thanks