Like Jonathan said, yes, renaming can help to work around this problem. But ,e.g. I was forced to rename target executable many times, it's some tedious and not good.
The problem lies there that when you run your project and later get an error that you can't build your project - it's so because this executable (your project) is still runnning (you can check it via task manager.) If you just rename target build, some time later you will get the same error with new name too and if you open a task manager, you will see that you rubbish system with your not finished projects.
Visual studio for making a new build need to remove previous executable and create new instead of old, it can't do it while executable is still runinng. So, if you want to make a new build, process of old executable has to be closed! (it's strange that visual studio doesn't close it by itself and yes, it looks like some buggy behaviour).
It's some tedious to do it manually, so you may just a bat file and just click it when you have such problem:
taskkill /f /im name_of_target_executable.exe
it works for me at least. Like a guess - I don't close my program properly in C++, so may be it's normal for visual studio to hold it running.
ADDITION: There is a great chance to be so , because of not finished application. Check whether you called PostQuitMessage in the end, in order to give know Windows that you are done.