In VS2008, when you build a big solution with many projects, if one of the projects fails with an Error, it still attempts to link the startup project, which obviously is unnecessary in most cases because if a project fails you'll need to fix that error first before running the program.
Does anyone know how to get VS2008 to not try to link if there was an error in any of the projects?
It depends on the options you've set in Visual Studio. Have a look at this question.
Essentially, in Studio, go to Tools -> Options -> Projects and Solutions -> Build and Run.
You can choose how you want to handle build failures.
You could try setting some of those projects in your solution as a dependency for your start-up project, this way VS will build them prior to building it and would skip building it if any of it's dependencies fail to build.