Compiler messages:

It is a good idea to leave all these messages activated as they make it much easier to identify problems when you are publishing.

Handling of dead links:

These settings define how Help & Manual deals with dead hyperlinks created when you exclude topics from your build without also excluding links to them in other topics.

Silently include linked topics:
Excluded topics will be exported anyway if they are referenced in links in other topics in your project.Topics exported in this way do not have TOC entries – they are exported "invisibly" and will only be displayed when the user clicks on the links referencing them.

Remove link:
Removes the hyperlink from the text, leaving only plain text. This is really only recommended for testing purposes because the dead links may not make sense in your text if they are inactive.

Allow links to be dead:
This option does nothing. The links are not changed and the user will either get an error message or nothing at all will happen when they click on the links.

Tolerant handling of Asian languages:

Allows you to publish projects in Asian languages on Windows systems whose language does not match the language of the help project. Some features in the help generated may not work properly (Search, Index) – to test these features properly you need a matching version of Windows.

Help Compilers:

The paths to the Microsoft compilers for HTML Help and Visual Studio Help 2008 (VS Help 2010 does not require a compiler). You must have these compilers installed to be able to output your projects to these formats!

Note that Visual Studio Help is only relevant for programmers documenting Visual Studio .NET components. It is irrelevant for all other purposes and cannot be used as a general help or documentation format for application programs.

Resets all the settings and paths to the default values.

Search for  compilers:

Attempts to locate the necessary compiler executable files in your Program Files directory.