System.BadImageFormatException

I'm currently building the new Overclockers New Zealand website in .NET.

I have a nice continuous integration server going smoothly, but my most recent check-in threw up a strange error when running the Unit Tests:

System.BadImageFormatException : Could not load file or assembly ‘Overclockers.Web, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null’ or one of its dependencies. The module was expected to contain an assembly manifest.

The server is actually a VMWare instance, but is running a 32-bit version of Windows Server 2003 EE.

After some troubleshooting and searching, I decided to first try to explicitly build for x86 first anyway. This is done in the Project Properties dialog in Visual Studio.

Target platform for X86

When changing this, make sure you make the change for both Debug and Release configurations.

This seemed to fix the problem.

I suspect this could be because I have some Shell32 interop in one of my shared libraries, and this may have caused problems, and/or the fact I'm running the instance on VMWare.