*** missing operator in Symbian

2 years in the buisiness and still I stumble upon fairly easy things.... I was building a peoject in carbide and it gave an error called "*** missing operator" .., I tried to find out what was happening. Eventually I got two threads which actually describes the problem

http://dev.eclipse.org/newslists/news.eclipse.tools.cdt/msg06739.html

http://www.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?t=129440

Actually the project was built in Windows XP. In windows 7 (when I tried to build it again) , it replaced the tab in the icon_scalable_dc.mk file and replaced those with a bunch of spaces; that is why it was not getting that error.