Question

I have a program which stores plugins in multiple directories, like so:

root/
  core/bin/
    app.exe
    core.dll
    plugin.dll
    support.dll
  a/bin/
    a.dll
    a_support.dll

In this example, a.dll imports core.dll, support.dll, and a_support.dll (they are in that order in the import table). a_support.dll imports support.dll. I can change all but the support modules, those are redists of a third-party library.

My code calls LoadLibraryEx(name, NULL, LOAD_WITH_ALTERED_SEARCH_PATH) to load each plugin. For core.dll and plugin.dll, this works fine.

When I try to load a.dll, it fails saying a_support.dll was not found. No errors about core.dll or support.dll, perhaps because they’re already in memory.

My suspicion is that when a_support.dll is loaded, support.dll cannot be found, but this seems unusual as a.dll appears to import support.dll before a_support.dll.

Is this layout of modules even possible to use? Will the system be able to use the already-loaded support DLLs, or will it go searching for them and fail? Would there be a way to handle this through manifests? Is there a way to make this work, or will I have to relocate all modules into a single directory?

Edit: At Adrian McCarthy’s suggestion, I ran the loading sequence with Process Monitor tracking, and it seems that when I call LoadLibrary("root/a/bin/a.dll", ...), it starts by searching the root directory, then system directories, then down through the path. For some reason, it never searches a/bin/, which it very much should.

I double-checked the paths, and noticed that my calls to load plugin.dll where using the wrong path (root, instead of root/core/bin). Either way, core.dll was loading correctly. After fixing that, I tried it again and this time a.dll does find a_support.dll and seems to load. However, that makes absolutely no sense, unless the loader is successfully using support.dll from… somewhere. The procmon log doesn’t show it even attempting to load support.dll again, so I’m not entirely sure at this point if there actually is a problem (besides behavior from the loader that makes no sense).

Answer 1

I suggest using Process Monitor to see what’s really happening. You’ll see if it’s looking in the right place, whether a_support.dll is opened but not loadable because something else is missing, etc.