"Unspecified error" in Visual Studio 2008 when trying to view project properties

visual-studio-2008

Solution

The x64 components for Visual Studio 2008 had not been installed on the second computer. Installing those solved the problem.

(There are a lot of unhelpful hits in Google when searching for a solution to this problem. Hopefully this helps someone else in the future.)

Problem

When I set my active solution from Win32 to x64, I cannot build the project or view the properties. When I try to build my project, it is skipped. When I try to view the properties, the first time I try, nothing happens. The second time, I get an error message saying, "The operation could not be completed. Unspecified error". I am running Visual Studio 2008 sp1. The project compiles correctly on another computer.

Original source