Strange link error - LNK1224: Invalid Image Base

Question

I'm having some real difficulties porting a really old Visual Studio 97 C++ project to Visual Studio 2010. Let me begin by first giving a little background on the errors I was getting immediately prior to this new LNK1224 error because they may be related, but I'm not sure.

Prior to my new error I was receiving this error:

error LNK2005: "void __cdecl operator delete(void *)" (??3@YAXPAX@Z) already defined in LIBCMT.lib(delete.obj)  nafxcw.lib(afxmem.obj)

Through some digging I found that the reason for this error was because both the MFC and CRT libraries contain definitions for "new" and "delete" so they were colliding. Microsoft provides 2 solutions for this detailed in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q148652/ . One of them was to make sure that in all your files you always include the MFC headers (afx stuff) first. Well there are about 100 files in this project and I just got tired of trying to find the files that were including resources in the wrong order. So I went with the other solution which is basically forcing libraries to load in a particular order. Basically you have to tell the compiler to ignore a particular library so that you can load it explicitly your self in the order that you choose. In my case, it was nafxcw.lib.

So under Project Properties --> Linker --> Input, I explicitly ignored nafxcw.lib and then explicitly included it at the front of the list.

So after doing this, my LNK2005 errors went away. But they were replaced with one single link error.

error LNK1224: invalid image base 0x287600000

I don't know if I fixed my previous link errors correctly and this new link error is in fact the next thing I have to deal with, or I simply created a more critical link error that is basically stopping the linking process before it gets to my original LNK2005 errors. In either case, there isn't much information I could find on this error. Microsoft doesn't say much in this link about it http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/3ya3f8wz%28v=vs.80%29.aspx

You specified an invalid base address for the image. Base addresses must be 64KB aligned (the last four hex digits must be zero) and image base must fit within a 32-bit signed or unsigned value.

This isn't all that helpful to me and there seems to be no other clues as to where this problem is coming from. I don't know what the next step is.

Answer 1

OK, so it looks like I have solved my own problem. Here is what I did. I needed to know where the heck this number was coming from so I simply used Notepad++ to do a word search through all the project files looking for "2876" which I got from the error message "LINK : fatal error LNK1224: invalid image base 0x287600000". I found that in the project file (.vcxproj) had the following entry in it:

<BaseAddress>0x287600000</BaseAddress>

So I opened it up and sat there wondering how this number was wrong. I mean I don't even know what this field is for. I didn't even generate this file, M$ made it. Why would the IDE create it's own input file incorrectly? Anyways, as I was trying to google this "BaseAddress" item to figure out what it was, it dawned on me that it looked like there were too many zero's. So I went back and counted and sure enough, this wasn't a 32-bit number, it was a 36-bit number. Deleted one of the zero's, recompiled, and boom it worked. Low and behold, that's kind of what the defintion I looked up, mentioned in the problem statement, hinted at looked up earlier on MSDN but it didn't click.

I don't make a habit to rummage through auto generated files very often so I never questioned that this may be the problem.