I've also seen this problem when you save the .sln and/or .vcproj files as Unicode. Once you save a sln or vcproj file as Unicode, Visual Studio likes to run with it and keep saving with that encoding. Go back to Visual Studio and open the project. Close any open documents, highlight the project in Solution explorer, and go the menu command File | Save projectname as.... Select ANSI Project File from the Save as Type drop-down and save it. (Or try UTF-8 if some of the settings or file names in your project have unicode characters). Then close the solution, and try it again from SlickEdit.