This is almost surely an issue of the library build settings out of sync with the program build settings. The included VC7 IDE projects might be out of sync with the bjam builds. here are some other things to try
a) from with in the serialization/test directory, invoke the batch file with the argument vc-7_1 . This should build all the libraries, demos and tests for the serialization libary with a consistent set of settings. b) If the above works, move the libraries from where they are build boostdir/bin/... etc to you favorite local spot and alter thid IDE projects to point to them. c) Note that I have found that the IDE projects with the VC 7.1 IDE often report a non-sensical error when I try to bring them up. This can be fixed by going to the build menu item and selecting configuration setup and explictly selectinga configureuation. The problem then goes away for a while. Its an VC IDE thing.
I built out everything in test as suggested (there were a few that failed, but don't appear to be related). I then took the library built in libs\serialization\build\libboost_serialization.lib\vc-7_1\debug\threading-multi and moved it to my build location. I ended up getting the same failure. To make sure that my build was picking up the library at link, I added it as a resource to the project, and it continued to have the failure (so I'm sure my project is linking to the library). Is there any more information I could give you about my setup that might help? Jared