Something, maybe the windows sdk or visual studio installer, has defined the Platform environment variable and given it the value BNB.
What does BNB mean, and why is
I used the EnvironmentVariables route, this worked & no reboot required
"HP Easy Setup" ? It creates a PLATFORM environmental variable that msbuild will default to if its not directly provided, see http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/roboticssimulation/thread/8c158025-c48e-4ae1-9921-b8ee4f390bac/