Thanks to danielo on the Blender coder forums, I now have OpenEXR 1.4.0 building with Blender. It was sort of a white whale for me, so I’m glad the solution was discovered.

It turns out that an OpenEXR project file was the culprit. Even when changing the Half project to /MT so it will be compatible with Blender, Half.vcproj project contained extraneous preprocessor definitions; namely _USRDLL and _DLL. Removing those and building OpenEXR (with zlib) with /MT creates the proper, compatible, OpenEXR libraries. Of course, I did a build. So now the real issue is if I add the new IlmThread.lib to the includes of the linker for my downloadable project files. Doing this will make my builds go fine (since I have updated OpenEXR libraries) but will cause anyone else without the libraries to have a build failure. As I don’t think anyone is using my project files except me, I think I’ll do it. So on the files page you can find the updated OpenExr libs plus the updated project files.

Also, I have updated the Building MSVC tutorial to include instructions on using the latest Microsoft SDK.