Unexplainable crash in DirectX app in Windows XP that uses english language

Question

The app was working fine but now a few weeks later when the new version begun testing, it crashes. Tried it on five of the workstations, it crashes only on two of them. And the only common about them I can find is that those two have Windows installed with english language.

Its a DirectX 8.1 application, written in C++ with Visual Studio 2005. SP2 is installed on all machines.

I have no clue about what could cause this. Surely, the language cant cause an DX app to crash? Im going to look for more common elements but I just wanted to ask if anyone have seen this before? If the language really is the problem. And how to solve it.

Edit: The actual error message is

This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix the problem.

At first we thought it was the Visual Studio Redistributable, but no luck. Something is missing, and I need to figure out what.

Answer 1

Any error messages of the crash? Any other information you can provide?

Answer 2

Make sure you don't compare string messages when checking for errors. I've seen errors like this in a code that was searching for 'refused' in socket error messages, failing on non-english machines.

Answer 3

Perhaps the "English version" workstations were left to auto-update, and updated to a newer version of DirectX than those on the other computers.

Try using the dxdiag program to compare DirectX versions on each of the computers.

What else is different between each of the workstations? Do they all have the same exact hardware? What about video drivers? Are they all the same?

Answer 4

Problem solved. And as a note to others having the same problem, I found the answer in this question. We installed the VS2005 CRT alright, but not the SP1 one.

Edit: Although, I still have no idea why this only affected the english workstations. Maybe it was a coincidence after all.