VS Installer adds unidentified dependency

Question

I am creating an installation package for a VB6 application using Visual Studio Installer from the Visual Studio Installer Enterprise Tools v6.0. My issue is that Installer is adding a strange item under depdendencies, named simply "3". The "Sourcefile" and "Target" properties for this item are also shown as just "3". The "ComponentId" property values shows a GUID of "{EC1441E1-073C-4AD6-886F-1C6C6E998CAD}", which doesn't show up in a search within regedit on my PC. I'm not able to identify anything within the references or components of the VB6 project that would explain a dependency on a file named simply "3".

Has anyone seen this before, or have some insight as to where that dependency might be coming from?

Thanks in advance for any replies.

Answer 1

May be some maleware COM component! Do a thorough scan of your computer with a good antivirus.

And oh yes if it isn't malware then unregister the dependency from the registry using

regsvr32 /u <offending guid>

and then re-run your application to see if it crashes (do a thorough test) if not then you dont need it. If it does then debug and find out who is using it.

Answer 2

No malware - searches on the net found others with the same issue, but no resolutions. Builds done since then no longer have the dependency, so it remains a mystery.