Can't get visual studio C++ include file 'excpt.h' to get installed

For those who have the same problem, here is the solution I found after about 10h of install/uninstall/cleaning cycles... I've uninstalled completely visual studio using this. After that, using the control panel, I've uninstalled the Windows SDK and everything that can be associated with it or with visual studio (e.g. .NET framework). Then, I've removed all the left overs by manually deleting the visual studio and the Windows SDK folders located in C:/Program files. Finally, I deleted all the entries related to the Windows SDK or to Visual Studio in the registry (they are located in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft). Then, I reinstalled Visual Studio... and it was finally working correctly. I should add that I restarted and cleaned the registry using CCleaner after any install or uninstall step.

I had this problem with a project that had been updated to VS2017 from VS2015.

This was a header included via windows.h. I knew this header should have no problems as I had other projects created directly in VS2017 that used windows.h.

Another symptom was that the intellisense was highlighting includes of standard headers (e.g string, vector etc), although these were not generating compile errors.

The fix for me was similar to VS 2010 Cannot open source file “string”.

Initially, I retargeted the project, hoping this would help (right-click the project, select retarget projects), but this did not in itself cure the problem.

I then took a working project and copied the include directories from project properties->Configuration Properties->VC++ Directories and used these to replace the same property for my broken project. This fixed the problem.

Initially, the value for this property was

$(VCInstallDir)include;$(VCInstallDir)atlmfc\include;$(WindowsSDK_IncludePath);

The replacement value was

$(VC_IncludePath);$(WindowsSDK_IncludePath);

See if you have it at C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\include\excpt.h Check to be sure that the system include-paths are correct in Visual Studio. If all else fails, uninstall everything, all SDK's, etc., and re-install Visual C++.

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