I put the hello.c 'hello world' program in c:\hello\ and opened the IDDE by clicking on a shortcut. I created a new project called hi.prj for a windows NT console application in c:\hello\ going otherwise with the IDDE defaults, and added hello.c to that project. Compilation went fine. Then I clicked build. Here is the outcome in the output window. (I deleted my path from this after Path= .)

link /CO /NOI /DE /NOPACKF /XN /NT /ENTRY:mainCRTStartup /BAS:4194304 /A:512 @hi.LNK
Error: Filename Expected
Path=
^
Errors: 1  Warnings: 0
Build failed

If I take a look in c:\hello\ there are the following files.

hello.c  hello.obj  hi.BPT  hi.BRO  hi.DEF  hi.DPD  hi.MAK  hi.OPN  hi.prj

Notice that hello.LNK isn't there; I don't know if that's significant.
===
I don't NEED the IDDE, but if there are any suggestions I'd be grateful.

Solved my own problem. This information may help others, as the cause could be very common.

In the Module Definition file hi.DEF produced by the IDDE is a line specifying the stub file placed at the front of the executable.

STUB    'WINSTUB.EXE'

Commenting this line out with a semicolon eliminated the linking problem, so then I went to look for the real cause.

Optlink wasn't finding WINSTUB.EXE on my PATH despite it being there. Windows7 allows a very long PATH and perhaps c:\dm\bin\ was too far down that PATH for Optlink to find it, because Optlink being pretty old assumed that paths are less than 512 bytes long or something analogous to that. Certainly I have a very long path, and c:\dm\bin\ was behind a lot of stuff.

I moved c:\dm\bin to the front of my system PATH and everything started working.

On Thursday, 27 September 2012 at 20:19:46 UTC, Carl Sturtivant wrote:
> I moved c:\dm\bin to the front of my system PATH and everything started working.

I spoke too soon! If & when I get the IDDE working smoothly I will post my conclusions here.