Quote Originally Posted by jlewand61 View Post
OK. I looked through the sln and vcxproj files (3 of them?) and no C: hardcoded anywhere. I can only come to the conclusion that VS C++ isn't designed to coherently move files around.
That's not a correct conclusion though. It's perfectly alright to move the code around or rename the folder or whatever. You have done something bad to the setup but that doesn't mean that MSVC is flawed.

Have you tried creating a brand new project letting everything be as it is as default and move that around?

Regarding what should be in a solution and not is up to you. In many of my projects I have a solution that when it's built outputs several binaries. For instance the load file for an embedded system (using another compiler/linker), the PC executable that is used for unit testing and possibly a PC executable used to communicate with the embedded system when running it on the bench.