If you publish a Clickonce application from within visual studio, it will generate publish.htm .This seems to be Visual Studio generated, and not part of the publish target
I just wrote a target that escaped the characters for msbuild, and generates the publish.htm file on the fly. No need to setup external dependencies on 3rd party build task assemblies :D The only thing to consider is which frameworks your application is truly dependent upon. If you force a targeted version of something higher than 3.5, you will need to update this task accordingly. This structure also assumes you are using msbuild version 4.0 (aka ToolsVersion="4.0").
YourTitle
YourPublisherName
YourCompanyName
YourAppName
YourVersionNumber