Volodya, Thanks for responding! When I run bjam (using Boost Build v2) to compile an executable that uses the serialization library, it appears to look for either the wrong version of the library or the right library in the wrong directory. Here's what I see: I've tried to set up my projects to always use the default settings. So I do not have any explicit setting of either the <link> or <runtime-link> flags anywhere. So all of object files get compiled in the directory bin/msvc-8.0express/debug/threading-multi I am therefore guessing that bjam then looks unsuccessfully for a statically linked serialization library in $(BOOST_ROOT)/bin.v2/msvc-8.0express/debug/threading-multi That directory contains only a dynamically linked version (so the name does not have the prefix "lib"). Of course, the directory $(BOOST_ROOT)/bin.v2/msvc-8.0express/debug/link-static/threading-multi seems to have the desired library. I'm not sure what's going on.