Hi, thanks for posting this issue. I really appreciate you taking the time to submit the sample solution as this always make analysis of such issues much easier.

Although this may be a surprise, this behaviour is actually by design. NCrunch uses a build optimisation that allows it to build projects individually, outside of the normal VS build chain. In order for this to work, NCrunch isn't able to copy dependencies upwards into referencing projects because doing this requires a rebuild of every referencing project, then every project referencing these projects (thus completely invalidating the optimisation).

When experiencing problems with this behaviour, people usually observe it through assembly referencing issues, but it does also apply to files marked to be copied to the build output directory. The documentation is geared more towards helping people identify/resolve assembly referencing issues rather than the one you've reported, which perhaps might need to be revised - http://www.ncrunch.net/documentation/considerations-and-constraints_assembly-colocation-assumptions.

Anyway, to turn off the build optimisation that is causing this problem, just set the Copy referenced assemblies to workspace NCrunch project-level configuration setting on the test project to 'True'.