I just came across this problem today, and I found this Microsoft Help and Support page that actually did work around the problem.
I had a couple delegates at the top of my file, in the global namespace, and all of a sudden I was getting a MissingManifestResourceException
when running the program, on this line:
this.Icon = ((System.Drawing.Icon)(resources.GetObject("$this.Icon")));
Then I moved the delegates into the namespace, got the same error. Finally I put the delegates in the only class in that file, and the error went away, but I didn't want the delegates in that class or namespace.
Then I came across that link above, which said
To resolve this problem, move all of the other class definitions so that they appear after the form's class definition.
I put the delegates (which I would not consider "class definitions") at the bottom of that file, outside of the local namespace, and the program didn't get the MissingManifestResourceException
anymore. What an irritating error. But, that seems like a more robust solution than modifying the auto-generated code :)