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It should not be that hard to fix this. I've a dll that is listed only once in the project dependencies and is listed only once in the file System list. Yet I not only get this message upon rebuild, (as a warning NOT an error,) but upon the install the application can not find any instances of the dll. And to add to that the file is underlined in red and does not give any indication as to why. The solution spelled out by MN_S does not work. The solution spelled out by Microsoft does not work because there is no place the files are visibly shown twice. The packaging and deployment wizard in VB 6.0 was a thousand time better than this process. It would take minutes to build a package that always worked. I been working on this for 6 days and still can't get it to work.

My project consists of about 10 applications and an installer. Many of the applications share components (dlls). I have carefully set up all dependencies. When building the installer, whenever projects A and B both depend on component C, the warning in question is issued for C. Sometimes the Fix mentioned above (cleaning and refreshing and rebuilding) works, sometimes it does not. On top of that sometimes you can delete the duplicate but usually you cannot (the delete choice is dimmed). To me it seems like this is a bug in VS, and it has happened at least since VS2005. Why can't MS either correct this or at least provide the option to not include duplicates in this situation.

This is how I got rid of these warning messages in my project:

In my error list, the two files listed were [appname].exe and [appname].exe.config. These are NOT the same file. This appears to be an error on the part of the VS environment not to recognize these two files as distinct. Since it is only a Warning, and not an Error, I am choosing to ignore the problem for the time being. The application runs.

This explanation is not good enough.

It is not possible to delete or set Conditions to fix this error, as suggested above. When setup project is including several "Primary Output from ProjectX", the dependencies are causing this warning. And you cant delete dependencies or individual projects wont compile.

Search net for "Two or more objects have the same target location" and you will see the problem many are having with this "warning" - I have 72 of them in a setup project and I cant get rid of them. I including the required Primary Output from Project as the setup targets and VS2008 is causing the problem itself by adding duplicate dependencies. You cannot delete them to remove the warning and there is no pragma/warning number to just ignore it!

Please improve, thanks.