Hi,

I noticed that in your error message, restrict is surrounded by 2
underscores on each side.
if I compile this:

__declspec(restrict) char * rfun();
it copiles just fine, but if I try this:
__declspec(__restrict__) char * rfun();

I too get
error C2485: '__restrict__' : unrecognized extended attribute

Which leads me to believe that somehow your declspecs get mangled since
__restrict__ really is invalid.

You said that VC8 was not yet explicitly supported by that toolkit.
restrict was not yet known by VC7.1.
Could it be that a macro definition is wreaking havoc?

If that is the case then you can find this out by looking at the
preprocessed output and checking
what gets changed because ot which definitions.