Visual studio 2013 "A task was cancelled"

After installing VS 2013 (Update 3) on windows 7 SP1 I have similar situation like in this post After installing windows 8.1 sdk visual studio cant build any win32 project and print output :

1>----— Build started: Project: ConsoleApplication1, Configuration: Debug Win32 —----
1>A task was canceled.
1>A task was canceled.
========= Build: 0 succeeded, 1 failed, 0 up-to-date, 0 skipped ==========

Just to be complete,

Closing and reopening Visual Studio worked for me after I had changed the time zone and was getting the same errors as you.

I encountered the same error when I installed VS2013 update 5. During the installation my VS was open. Prior to installation of the update, I was asked to close VS but I neglected. That might have been the reason for the error although not sure about the exact cause.

After installation, the installer prompted me to restart the computer and the error was gone after I restarted my computer.