ClickOnce and WPF publish failure (and solution)

had been publishing

   This one is courtesy of Rocky Lhotka.  Ward tripped over this nightmare in Rocky�s blog and felt it will surely bite us sometime this year.

http://www.lhotka.net/weblog/ClickOnceAndWFPPublishFailureAndSolution.aspx

I've been working all day on this WPF/WCF application, mostly trying to figure out how to configure WCF to actually do what I want in terms of security and authentication. All those angle brackets from the config files have given me a splitting headache... WCF may be cool, but configuring even relatively simple security scenarios is ridiculously difficult.

And then distaster struck. As though fighting with WCF and SSL wasn't enough, VS 2008 decided to quit publishing my app for ClickOnce. In order to test this app, I need to publish for ClickOnce on my dev box, copy the results to a test server and then run the code on a test client (thankfully we live in an age of virtual machines!!).
So the failure to publish to ClickOnce brought me up short. The issue is that the WPF project wouldn't build. It would build and run fine in all other ways, but not when I tried to publish for ClickOnce. It had been publishing just fine, and then BOOM!
(The only thing I can think of is that I was publishing for online only, then I published for online/offline, and then I switched back to online only - maybe VS doesn't like that sort of waffling and wants me to be more decisive?)
The specific problem is that the .g.i.cs files for each XAML source file that should have been in the obj\Debug directory didn't get there. Google was no help - searching for "clickonce publish .g.i.cs obj\Debug could not be found" resulted in one hit - to an MSDN forums post that was unreachable (I kept getting an MSDN forums error page).
Build|Clean Solution had no effect. Shutting down and reopening VS had no effect. Rebooting the dev box had no effect.
Finally I thought to manually delete the obj and bin folders in the project directory. And for good measure I deleted the .user file and .suo file for the project and solution. Then I reopened the project and it how publishes just fine.