Is it safe to rewrite an EXE or DLL manifest to force a particular version of the MSVC CRT DLLs?

Question

Is it supported by Microsoft to simply rewrite the manifest of an EXE or DLL to force the use of a specific version of the MSVC CRT?

I am interested in doing this because of recent problems with Visual Studio 2005/2008 security updates (KB971090 and KB971092). I would like to simply rewrite the manifest as a post build step in order to stop the problem of multiple versions of the CRT DLLs appearing there.

The two versions of the MSVC CRT DLL in question are v8.0.50727.4053 and v8.0.50727.762, so only minor version number changes.

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This question has branched out from: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1265792/visual-studio-2005-security-updates-and-crt-dll-versions-in-manifest

Answer 1

this is a safe way and is automated so does not require any manual maintenance of manifest files