I thought that my problem was how I was declaring a manifest file. But now I think I can safely rule this out. I think the probem lies in the way I am loading the DLL/COM object that the manifest file references. The program runs -- sort of. After I embed the manifest file into the executable. I just cannot step through the code in debug mode. So I put the manifest file into the list of files that the IDE had to reference. And then I noticed a big change. Then the executable that I produced had an error message (that I could ignore and continue running the program, if I choose to) that said the probem was with the way I was loading the COM object. How do I load a DLL into a GUI front-end written in C#. Where should I look for possible problems?