Publishing C# project from Visual Studio 2015 invalid manifest

My project runs fine within Visual Studio, but when I publish it and try to run setup.exe for it on the same dev computer, I get an error:

    + Exception reading manifest from file:///C:/Game/Application%20Files/F1_1_0_0_9/F1.exe.manifest: the manifest may not be valid or the file could not be opened.
    + Parsing and DOM creation of the manifest resulted in error. Following parsing errors were noticed: 
        -HRESULT:   0x8007001f
         Start line:    0
         Start column:  0
         Host file:     
    + A device attached to the system is not functioning. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007001F)

I have tried disabling signing of ClickOnce manifests, that just gives me a different error.

After trying a million things like signing the manifest differently, deleting/adding dpi-aware flags to the manifest, using different versions of .NET, etc, I managed to solve it just by deleting the manifest file from my solution. Amazing.