Web Deployment Projects fail without errors

Now I'm getting to love VS 2008 and deployment projects.

Web Deployment Project always fails the build, when being executed from VS 2008 (and sporadically on the CC.NET), but, at the same time:

• There is not a single error or warning in the error log (or in the output in the diagnostic mode).
• Command-line build works
• Googling shows up multiple posts with the same problem and no definite resolution (there is a workaround for Linq 2 SQL users, but that's not the case in this situation)
• VS 2008 itself messes up the math: 3 succeeded projects (as reported by the output) equal to summary: "Build: 2 succeeded or up-to-date, 1 failed, 0 skipped"

How am I supposed to fix the thing if it does not tell me what's going wrong?

Updates (as I've been looking for the problem):

• Some people report this problem to manifest itself after installing VS 2008 SDK.
• MSBuild could fail silently if some custom task breaks down.
• Fusion log viewer reports that aspnetcompiler.exe fails to load aspnetcompiler.dll|exe. But this is not the root of the problem.
• That's the nice assembly that get merged into the precompiled one: AppTheme_svn.dll. This issue with the deployment algorithm is not the cause of the problem, however.

Resume: according to the rule of thumb below, it is not efficient to continue looking for the solution to this specific problem.

If you spend more than a couple of hours trying to fix some mysterious framework/IDE problem without any luck, then probably this problem is not worth fixing. It would either be fixed by some hotfix/SP or the home-made fix would be quite complicated/fragile (adding more maintenance problems than it resolves). Let it go, step back and look for the workaround.

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