Error 'LINK : fatal error LNK1123: failure during conversion to COFF: file invalid or corrupt' after installing Visual Studio 2012 Release Preview

This MSDN thread explains how to fix it.

To summarize:

• Either disable incremental linking, by going to

  Project Properties 
     -> Configuration Properties 
         -> Linker (General) 
            -> Enable Incremental Linking -> "No (/INCREMENTAL:NO)"
  

• or install VS2010 SP1.

Edits (@CraigRinger): Note that installing VS 2010 SP1 will remove the 64-bit compilers. You need to install the VS 2010 SP1 compiler pack to get them back.

This affects Microsoft Windows SDK 7.1 for Windows 7 and .NET 4.0 as well as Visual Studio 2010.

If disabling incremental linking doesn't work for you, and turning off "Embed Manifest" doesn't work either, then search your path for multiple versions of CVTRES.exe.

By debugging with the /VERBOSE linker option I found the linker was writing that error message when it tried to invoke cvtres and it failed.

It turned out that I had two versions of this utility in my path. One at C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\BIN\cvtres.exe and one at C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\cvtres.exe. After VS2012 install, the VS2010 version of cvtres.exe will no longer work. If that's the first one in your path, and the linker decides it needs to convert a .res file to COFF object format, the link will fail with LNK1123.

(Really annoying that the error message has nothing to do with the actual problem, but that's not unusual for a Microsoft product.)

Just delete/rename the older version of the utility, or re-arrange your PATH variable, so that the version that works comes first.

Be aware that for x64 tooling builds you may also have to check C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\bin\amd64 where there is another cvtres.exe.

Check the version of cvtrs.exe:

dir "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\bin\cvtres.exe"

Wrong version:
date: 03/18/2010
time: 01:16 PM
size: 31,048 bytes
name: cvtres.exe

Correct version:
date: 02/21/2011
time: 06:03 PM
size: 31,056 bytes
name: cvtres.exe

If you have wrong version you should copy the correct version from:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\VC\bin\cvtres.exe

and replace the one here:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\bin\cvtres.exe

i.e.

copy "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\VC\bin\cvtres.exe" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\bin\cvtres.exe"