// Don't remove this comment, or the next line will break.  WTF?!?

Turns out, we had mixed carriage returns and line feeds in our source. We had some UNIX coders, and some Windows coders. The Windows coders were in VS6 (ug), and the IDE showed the code perfectly. The compiler, on the other hand, was getting confused because one file had mixed CR/LF... So, essentially, it thought

    // Comment
    formatHardDrive = true;

It thought that pesky next line was still part of the comment. It wasn't literally formatting the hard drive... that was another bug we encountered, one time... oh, the places you'll go...