Error loading netlist. IO_ERROR: invalid PFID in file...

Get rid of "MLF10:" for the footprint in eeschema and it works. The ":" has no place there.

How is this invalid? That is a *horrible* error message. Nobody who isn't familiar with the footprint system is going to have a clue what the problem is, and *certainly* you shouldn't have to open the file and go to the line number to know what the problem is!

These should be validated at the point of entry! eeschema doesn't let you create components with spaces in the names, for instance:

"Whitespace is not permitted inside references or values
(symbol names in lib).
The text you entered has been converted to use underscores: "

which is much better than saving the crap name to a file and then making the poor user deal with a vague parser error later.

If you insist on letting the crap footprint through, at least fix the error message. First of all, it's "FPID", not "PFID" - I've been using kicad for *years* and had no clue what a PFID was supposed to be, I had to grep the source for that. "Footprint ID" would be even clearer, and we're not paying a tax on message length! Second, at least include the component reference in the error!

This is not the sort of user experience you can get away with if you want anyone without a masochistic bent to use your software. This error message is bad enough to be a bug.

I agree with Chris,

It even got worse with later releases of kicad, it is no longer even possible to see which file the error are in

Current error message look like

       Error loading netlist.
       IO_ERROR: invalid PFID in
       file: <Eechema via kiwayt>
       line: 149
       ......

I have made a patch which reveal a little more information, an error message look like this
       Error loading netlist.
       IO_ERROR:
       Component 'C1' have an invalid footprint ID 'MLF10:' in
       file: <Eeschema via Kiway>
       line: 149
       ......

The patch is in

bzr push lp:~stol/kicad/bug1366298
Using default stacking branch /+branch-id/324654 at chroot-89625232:///~stol/kicad/
Created new stacked branch referring to /+branch-id/324654.

This was fixed a long time ago