>>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.

Glad to see that if we throw enough unrelated ideas at a problem, something eventually sticks... ;-)