After examining Boost.Regex and Boost.Locale Jamfiles, it's seems that both libraries perform the same has_icu check and both fail to detect ICU on Windows if the Intel compiler is used.
This is not exactly about building with ICC, but maybe somebody would like this hint: I managed to build boost 1.48.0 with ICU 4.8.1.1 adding this to bjam build command: -sHAVE_ICU=1 -sICU_PATH=path_to_the_ICU_dir -sICU_LINK="-L%ICU_PATH%/lib -licuuc48 -licuin48 -licudt48" (-sICU_LINK="-L$ICU_PATH/lib -licuuc48 -licuin48 -licudt48" for crosscompiling on Linux) This allows bjam to compile ICU correctly and works for all Windows target OS configurations. As a fact, I succeeded to build boost 1.48.0 with ICU 4.8.1.1 on Windows with msvc-10.0, mingw and also mingw crosscompiled on Linux for Windows target-os. That works. I think, that must do with ICC as well. Little note: in MinGW configurations threading=multi is needed, due to a bug in configuring scripts, that was written about in "Trouble building boost-1.48.0 with mingw 4.5.2" theme. Sincerely, Yana A. Kireyonok