Remove PDB references from released file

Read the PDB Files documentation on MSDN:

A program database (PDB) file holds debugging and project state information that allows incremental linking of a Debug configuration of your program. A PDB file is created when you compile a C/C++ program with /ZI or /Zi or a Visual Basic/C#/JScript .NET program with /debug.

In Visual C++, the /Fd option names the PDB file created by the compiler. When you create a project in Visual Studio using wizards, the /Fd option is set to create a PDB named project.PDB.

Note that the absolute path is mentioned in the documentation:

The Visual Studio debugger uses the project.PDB file created by the linker directly and embeds the absolute path to the PDB in the EXE or DLL file.

You can always go to Project Properties > Linker > Debugging > Generate Debug Info and set it to No.

If you you cannot rebuild your module (i.e. using the linker switch /PDBPATH:NONE which Microsoft seems to have removed support for), I wrote the peupdate tool for this purpose, as long as you don't mind using a 3rd-party tool. Peupdate can be used to list, remove or change the PDB string in an executable module. Below are some examples:

peupdate -c <module_path>           //clear entire PDB path
peupdate -k <module_path>           //remove PDB path, but retain filename
peupdate -u <newpath> <module_path> //set your own path string

You can use /pdbpath:none (or /pdbaltpath:%_PDB% on newer versions of link.exe) to remove the full qualified path name of the PDB file, but keep the name and extension of the PDB only. Keeping the name (and extension) of the PDB for released images is your only way to debug an image that is buggy. Windows images almost always keep the name and extension of the PDBs!