SPExtremeFrustrationFeature

I've been working with Windows SharePoint Services for a couple of months now, and I thought I finally had a handle on what went where, who did what, how it worked, and various other phrases containing the letter W. 

However, today I ran into a bug that has had me stopped dead all night.  I'm using the Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services (VSeWSS for short), which are intended to make deployment to your SharePoint farm part of the build process, and my projects suddenly stopped deploying correctly.  The only feedback I get from Visual Studio is the chillingly familiar "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" error, which any programmer will instantly recognize as a surefire sign that someone didn't check if their pointer was null, but seems like a strange bug in a deployment project.

At this point, I'm thinking that I'm going to need to rebuild my deployment project from scratch, which pretty much blows away any utility VSeWSS  might have given me. 

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On the upside, after rebuilding one of my other projects from scratch (because VSeWSS wouldn't build it correctly for entirely different reasons) I am intimately familiar with the WSS solution deployment strategy, so hopefully this won't take all day.