"Unrecoverable build error" on any MSI Setup project

Question

Some time ago I got this error when building ANY Visual Studio Deployment project.

"Unrecoverable build error"

I thought my VS installation was corrupted or I deleted some important files, but ...

Answer 1

...all I had to do was.

Close down Visual Studio.

Start, Run or WIN+R, type cmd, OK.

regsvr32 "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\MSI Tools\mergemod.dll"
regsvr32 ole32.dll

For x64 bit machines

regsvr32 "C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\MSI Tools\mergemod.dll"
regsvr32 ole32.dll

Warning: you MUST run the command prompt in Admin Mode!

Close Command Prompt.

Open up Visual Studio and try rebuilding your deployment project! It worked for me!

Answer 2

We had this problem, and the solutions above didn't work for us. After several days of head-scratching, we found that the solution for us was to delete all the VSI*.TMP files from the local user temp folder at:

C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temp

In our case this went wrong on a Hudson build machine - Visual Studio seems to create temp files and not clean them up properly. Once it has created 65536 temp files (VSI0000.tmp to VSIFFFF.tmp) it can't create any more and MSI projects will fail to build.

Kudos to this blog post for the solution:

http://blog.richardadleta.com/2009/08/using-visual-studio-command-line.html

Answer 3

This can also occur if you are including Project Output as "Publish Items" and you have not specified the PublishProfilePath that will produce the output. Unfortunately when you select this output type, you are not prompted to select this critical piece of information.

To specify the path, click on the Project Output item in the right pane of the File System window,

then display the Properties panel for it (Ctrl+W, P).

Click the field and you should be able to select the desired publish profile for your project (if you haven't created one you will need to by right clicking on the main project in Solution Explorer and then click Publish; I created a Folder profile). Do a clean build and in my case the issue was resolved.

Note that I had previously registered the above mentioned DLLs, so it's possible that was part of the issue as well.