This is my request and plea to software developers everywhere; if you write code that detects errors, PLEASE WRITE A FRICKEN DESCRIPTIVE ERROR MESSAGE.  </rant> So my automated build process at work , using Nant + CruiseControl.NET, stopped working yesterday.  I have been making numerous changes that reflect a new architecture and solution layout, so the changes were warranted.  I do one type of build that just grabs everything and puts the latest and greatest on a server.  Works no problemo.  Another type of build does a get by label; every release gets a label so this build displays all files since the last release.  Makes sense, and that is the one run less frequently.  So now I run it to test it and boom, not working.  Here it is, the world's greatest error message VSSDIFF: diff failed, error loading resource string Thank you very much, that gives me a lot of information to work with.  The <VssDiff> task from NAntContrib isn't working.  I play around with a lot of things and ensure my script is properly configured, it is.  To be sure I'm not doing something retarded I grab an older copy of the script from Source Safe and run it.  It dies as well.  Script is good, Source Safe isn't.  I try running the command against other directories in the project, they work.  Huh?  Okay, we have something here.  Now I run the command against individual subdirectories and find that my app /bin folder is the troublemaker. The project changes I made involved moving business logic into a separate solution that produced DLLs, then sharing those DLLs back into the website.  Rocket science.  And that wasn't the problem; the problem is, well, I have no clue but the solution was to purge older copies of those files from the /bin folder.  Soon as I did that I was back in business. I'm really glad Microsoft Visual Source Safe 2005 was there to help me... NOT!