Fix The Program Can’t Start Because MSVCR100D.dll Is Missing From Your Computer.

I had to reinstall Windows 7 on a different hard drive on my computer after the root drive crashed the other day. That meant a lot of re-installations of software, and sometimes error messages when a particular runtime or program was not installed on the system. Today I tried to run a program which failed to do so. It threw the error “The program can’t start because MSVCR100D.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling to fix this problem”.

Reinstalling obviously did not fix it. The strange thing was that the program installer recognized that Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 runtime libraries were missing, but the installation it launched to correct the issue did not correct the error when I tried to start the program after installation.

 

First thing I did was to check if the msvcr100d.dll file was actually copied to a system folder during installation of the runtime. Turned out, the file was nowhere to be seen, only the msvcr100.dll file was copied into the Windows system32 folder.

After some checking around I found out that the d at the end stands for debug version. I then checked the runtime installer file by extracting its contents on my computer, only to find out that msvcr100d.dll was not included in the setup file.

I’m not 100% sure about this but it seems as if the application developer made an error by making the program file that is requiring the debug dll depend on it. If that is correct, it could be that the msvcr100d.dll is only distributed with Visual Studio, and not the runtime libraries.

I fixed the issue by downloading the dll from a third party dll repository (make sure to select download zip-file on the page). I then extracted the dll directly into the program directly, and lo and behold, the program worked afterwards.

You can alternatively place it into your system32 folder, but I personally prefer it in the application folder to avoid issues with other programs. It is also easier to delete the file when the software gets uninstalled.

That got me thinking. Do you know of any repository on the Internet where you can look up file names and how they are distributed?

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