This popup comes up as soon as the app is started:
The program can’t start because MSVCP90.dll is missing from your computer.
Before anyone says “install the VC++ runtimes”, wait! If I rename the folder containing my .EXE then the app runs. If I rename it back, it breaks. The app has been running for weeks without any changes to my system/VS installation (2008 SP1), we suddenly spotted this error a few days ago.
Lost as to why the name of the dir is causing issues… again this has not changed in months and all our resource paths are relative anyway, e.g “../someOtherDir/….”
It doesn’t just do this on my PC, we have the /bin dir (the one containing EXE) in SVN and suddenly everyone started seeing the same issue, even though the binaries themselves seem just fine. Is it possible some additional data got put into SVN and that’s the cause? Since it’s not just one PC, there must be something either in SVN or the EXE itself…
Note this popup comes before our code even gets to run.
It seems that there is a .exe.manifest file lying around, specifying some other version of MSVCP90.dll. Removing this file should do the trick (In theory the manifest is the solution against dll hell, but in reality it is just a new PITA).