Compilation fails randomly: “cannot open program database”

Question

During a long compilation with Visual Studio 2005 (version 8.0.50727.762), I sometimes get the following error in several files in some project:

fatal erro         


        

Answer 1

I just ran into this problem. Visual studio was complaining about not being able to open vc100.pdb. I looked for open file handles to this file using procexp and found out that the process mspdbsrv had an open file handle to it. Killing this process fixed the issue and I was able to compile.