Hi,
When I first tried Visual studio it worked.
I use two installations of Atmel studio. One is on my desktop computer (winXP) and it is fine, no problems.
The other is on my laptop. Its a macbook pro and I have an WinXP virtual machine. When I started to use it a few months ago, it was OK. But now I get error messages about path length. 
My virtual machine has not changed but whatever it is is right on the limit of path length as some programs compile OK, but if  choose a program with a longer name it fails with the following output:

Compiling 'Home_logging_SD_NTP_V2_RTC' for 'Arduino Mega 2560 or Mega ADK'
System.IO.PathTooLongException: The specified path, file name, or both are too long. The fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters, and the directory name must be less than 248 characters.
   at System.IO.PathHelper.GetFullPathName()
   at System.IO.Path.NormalizePath(String path, Boolean fullCheck, Int32 maxPathLength)
   at System.IO.Path.GetFullPathInternal(String path)
   at System.IO.DirectoryInfo..ctor(String path)
   at Visual.Micro.Xml.XmlHelper.AddFilesOfFolder(XmlNode xAddTo, DirectoryInfo dinfo, Boolean recursive, Boolean& checkForObjectFiles, String outputPath)
   at Visual.Micro.Xml.XmlHelper.AddFilesOfFolder(XmlNode xAddTo, DirectoryInfo dinfo, Boolean recursive, Boolean& checkForObjectFiles, String outputPath)
   at Visual.Micro.Xml.XmlHelper.AddFilesOfFolder(XmlNode xAddTo, DirectoryInfo dinfo, Boolean recursive, Boolean& checkForObjectFiles, String outputPath)
   at Visual.Micro.Xml.XmlHelper.AddFilesOfFolder(XmlNode xAddTo, DirectoryInfo dinfo, Boolean recursive, Boolean& checkForObjectFiles, String outputPath)
   at ......

There is more of the same but I run out of space to post it.

What I cant be sure of is if in my early days of using it, I only compiled shorter named programs and as my use of it expanded, other programs just happened to have longer names and exceeded the limits. This may be the case, or perhaps something has changed in the program and a limit is now in place that was not there before.

Is there any way to change the build location? as I see that it in itself has a long path. If I could specify a location then that may get around my issue.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.
Stewie