WiX action removes quotes from linker options
 

For the WiX action, on the Linker page in the additional options field, VBP removes leading and trailing quotes.

For example, this:

"a b" "c d"

becomes this:

a b" "c d

I've verified this with 6.7a and 7.2. Adding leading and trailing whitespace will work around this.

Is there a reason for this behavior?

For filename and path fields, double quotes are trimmed from the value that is entered. This should not be done for the linker options field, and this will be fixed in the next release. For now, use the workaround you mentioned.

This is fixed in v7.2a.