>I had a couple of SWAGs, that was related to one of them - that your machine, and the one on which one or more of the project files was created are in different time zones and somehow aren't reconciled.
>
>Another one was whether your project references/includes another .EXE that is read-only... but no, I think this is actually if it references another .EXE that is encrypted, then it forces your main .EXE to be encrypted as well.

You'd never guess... but this encrypted thing that you mentioned triggered me to check the codepages. And yes, there it was. Everything had a codepage of none or 1252, except one one-record table which had codepage 1250, and there was also the codepage=1250 in config.fpw - I was doing something for my home company last month - and as soon as I changed the table to 1252 (by copying it back and forth, it's a free table), there it was, building in about 15 seconds instead of three or more minutes.