fatal error C1859

Once, a friend of mine set the welcome message on his Nokia 5110 to ‘fatal error’. This totally baffled the salesmen in Carphone Warehouse.

I was equally baffled when I returned to an old C++ project and tried to compile it in a freshly installed Visual Studio 2008 SP1. I was greeted with a series of these errors:

fatal error C1859: ‘Debug\blah.pch’ unexpected precompiled header error, simply rerunning the compiler might fix this problem

Not surprisingly, simply rerunning the compiler did not fix the problem. In fact, this is caused by address space layout randomization on Windows7/Server2008, as noted here.

The hotfix is available here: Fix for Visual C++ 2008 SP1 compiler error C1859