Have you ever had this problem? Welcome to DLL HELL muhahahaha... After installing the various .Net Framework versions from Microsoft or even after installing loads of software that you don't really need. Some of your programs start to act up or even complain about missing dlls. Well what you need is this little free utility.....read on...

What you need is this little free tool called dependancy walker. It works on Vista, XP and even server 2003. Using this tool is really really simple. Lets see how this can be useful by simulating a dll problem. Ok here we have a nice working open source gui html editor NVU. Its really quite excellent to use. Anyway let make this nice little application loose a required dll and see what happens. 

Ok here we have the NVU folder... hmm... xpcomm.dll looks important lets rename it to xpcomm.old

Ok Scottie I think we've created a problem, fire up NVU and we see a nice little error dialog and the application terminating. Ok it tells us it cannot find xpcomm.dll let see if the dependancy walker can find the problem.

Launch the application and use it to Open the executable file in question, in this case nvu.exe. Here you can see the dependancy walker screen Make sure you click on the C:\ button as I indicate in a red circle on the picture. This will list out the full paths of the dlls in the dll tree.

So here we can see the application has highlighted to us that xpcomm.dll is missing with an icon with a question mark.

Also from the error message indicated beside the dll

Dependancy Walker is a great tool, but its strength lies in its ability to check on the windows built in dlls. It may not be too much help for troubleshooting third party dlls though. It can sort out issues like wrong dll versions. Its a great tool none the less, and guess what its FREE. Download it HERE!!!

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