These are driving me nuts. My understanding of hintpaths was that some algorithm was used to determine the location of the referenced assembly based on the hintpath you provide. So, if you specify a hint path of \..\..\..\lib\myassembly.dll the reference can actually exist in a folder called lib which is nested up to 3 levels down from the root folder. From messing around, I can't see that hintpaths are anything other than relative paths to the current project or an absolute path.
The reason I need to get this working is that I have created a project template which references a number of assemblies. Now, I never know where the user is going to install the project in relation to the directory structure on the local machine, the only known is that the referenced dll exists in a known subtree of that structure somewhre. I though hintapths were supposed to help here.
