When I was in college people would come to me to help them with their C++ compilation errors. My secret? Most of them would start trying to fix the reported errors bottom up. I would start top down and be done with probably one missing semicolon or something simple as that.
Going top down seems to be the secret. I do mainly C# now but even there a lot of people get confused by looking at the last error on the screen. I always only look at the first error and deal with that before looking at anything else.
In my experience, having a list to work through is much faster to remedy than fixing one bug at a time, and then recompiling for the next bug. VB drove me nuts for this simple reason.
