Windows Side-by-Side Errors Stumping Me!

[Jim McGowan]

This is a Windows Side-by-Side issue that has run me ragged for about
a week now. Any help is greatly appreciated. It's on an HP Pavilion
desktop running Windows XP Pro w/SP2 and all WU updates.

About a week ago I suddenly started having trouble opening programs,
then closing programs, and shutting down and rebooting my PC. Event
viewer shows groupings of the same three errors repeated several
times:

Event ID 32 - Dependent Assembly Microsoft.VC80.MFCLOC could not be
found
and Last Error was The referenced assembly is not installed on your
system.

Event ID 59 - Resolve Partial Assembly failed for
Microsoft.VC80.MFCLOC
could not be found and Reference error message The referenced assembly
is not installed on your system.

Event ID 59 - Generate Activation Context failed for
C:\WINDOWS\WinSxS\x86_Microsoft.VC80.MFC_1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b_8.0.50727.42_x-ww_dec6ddd2\MFC80U.DLL.
Reference error message: The operation completed successfully.

When this happens I cannot open any programs, cannot close any, and
cannot shutdown or reboot. I have to force a shutdown with the Power
button.

Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware scans show the system is clean of malware.

I believe I have found the source and location of this problem, but
solving it is another problem altogether.

Apparently these side-by-side assemblies are a part of Visual Basic
and are installed with Windows Installer 3. The source, as best as I
can determiine, is a rather well-known and respected Pocket PC
software developer. A new application from him that I downloaded was
installed with Windows Installer 3; this was the first time that he
had packaged any application using the Windows Installer. Apparently
it was also the last. He received much feedback about problems like
mine and immediately reverted to using InstallShield.

All that is fine, except that I cannot find out how to fix the problem
on my PC!

The developer claimed that he fixed it on one of his PC's by just
deleting the VC80 folder in the ..\\Windows\WinSxS directory along
with searching through the registry and deleting all keys referencing
VC80. Not being confident enough in this method to start deleting
helter skelter, I decided to move the folder with the VC80 DLLs to
another location on my C:\\ drive and rebooting. Everything seemed to
be back to normal, but then I decided to try to open several programs
and see if they opened OK. I immediately found a few that could not
open. While I cannot be absolutely certain, I think that it is
applications that use the Windows Installer and had updates/upgrades
after I installed the program with the corrupted Windows Installer.

So I moved the folder back and, of course, the SxS errors started all
over again. Several posts on the MSDN boards have not gotten me any
help yet - they haven't responded. I see others with the same problem
there also.

I've seen suggested solutions on some heavy-duty programming sites,
but all are directed at developers and involve re-packaging their
applications into new Windows Installer packs and including certain
modified merge modules.... That's about as far as I get before I glaze
over, start weeping and giggling and drooling and... you get the
message; I'm not a programmer and don't really speak the language!

MS offers no solution at all - AND charges me to tell me that! Pretty
sure I'll get the charges reversed, though.

Well, I'm stymied. If there are any posters here with some
programming, V Basic, or C++ knowledge that has any suggestions, I'm
all ears.

Thanks folks.

 

[Maurice N ~ MVP]

Look at XP's System Restore. See how many restore points are available, and how far back they are.
To get out of the current situation, you may need to revert back to an old restore point.

Also, do you have a disk image or a backup of your system?

Have you tried booting into Safe mode, and then attempting to de-install the "problem application"?

 

[Jim McGowan]

Look at XP's System Restore. See how many restore points are available, and how far back they are.
To get out of the current situation, you may need to revert back to an old restore point.

Also, do you have a disk image or a backup of your system?

Have you tried booting into Safe mode, and then attempting to de-install the "problem application"?

Hi Maurice.

Unfortunately I had to disable and re-enable System Restore not too
long ago to troubleshoot an entirely different issue - SR was being
applied to ALL drives including, USB Flash drives, thus filling 10% of
the flash drive w/restore info and rendering them useless. When I
disabled/re-enabled SR it deleted all prior restore points.

Presently I back up only my media/data files, as my full backups were
getting way too large to store. (>150 GB compressed w/Dansk
Retrospect). I may have to look into making disk images - don't know
much about that.

I did manage to de-install the offending application, but it does not
seem to help.

If I try deleting (or hiding) the driver that keeps showing up in the
error messages - MFC80U.DLL - will that help? Will I then have to
reinstall any applications that won't start. Hopefully there is a way
to fix this without wiping the HDD!

What actually happened? Did corrupted DLL's get installed? Is there a
way to reinstall those DLL's correctly?

Thanks for the assistance, Maurice.