Side-by-side assemblies, Windows 7, and Visual Studio 2005

Question

I have a Windows 7 machine with Visual Studio 2005 SP1 installed. Using this, I build an application which loads a DLL at runtime compiled with VS2005 SP1 but on Windows XP. This fails, with the following error:

"...\foo.dll": The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log or use the command-line sxstrace.exe tool for more detail.

The DLL loaded is compiled against the debug CRT. The answer to this question hints that vcredist_x86.exe only contains release-versions of the CRT. I'm not sure if that is relevant in this case, since both my machine and the machine on which the DLL was compiled on both have the full VS2005 SP1 installed.

Should I attempt to rebuild the DLL on Windows 7 (I'd prefer not to), and will that cause the DLL to become unusable on the Windows XP machine?

Answer 1

Problem solved. The problem was that the Windows 7 machine did not have the KB971090 update which was installed on the Windows XP machine which built the DLLs. I had to explicitly tell Windows Update that I wanted to receive non-Windows updates in order to be able to install the update.