Mike,

  Thank you.  The article looks like it might have some good information in it.  (I dug into some of the links and came across the Dependency Walker link,  That looks like it might be able to tell me why that dependency tag keeps popping up.  However, I was able to finally get the deployment to work successfully by setting up on a new machine (a virtual machine that I used Remote Desktop to access) and starting over on that machine.  (Logged in and installed Visual Studio, connected to TFS, got the latest code, rebuilt and deployed.)  For whatever reason, that worked.  So it stands to reason that the problem might have something to do with files left over that Visual studio hasn't cleaned up properly.  Maybe, maybe not.  Either way, I got my deployment and can't afford to invest any more time on this right now.  But if I get a chance to come back and investigate, I'll post what I learn.  Thanks for your help.

Scott

Hi Mike,

Thank you for your reply.  So I've tried the suggestions that you had…

• I tried editing the manifest file directly.  But making changes to the manifest leads to the following error:
      Application manifest has either a different computed hash than the one specified or no hash specified at all.
  I also tried editing the manifest file in the bin\debug folder before publishing the ClickOnce, but that just leads to Visual Studio rebuilding the project and regenerating the manifest. 
• the licenses.licx file is empty.
• I verified the references by manually editing the project file.  All of the references were pointing to the .2023 version, as expected.  I found no lingering references to any .1000 versions.

I don't suppose that you know of any good references that explain how the manifest files are generated?  I couldn't find anything like ha on the internet.  (I spent hours searching for one, recently.)

Scott