Anyone encoutered this problem? (comctl32.dll)

[Krass]

I'm am trying to distribute an application that contains a listbar. That listbar is an OCX and the description goes like this: An accurate reproduction of the Microsoft Outlook Bar, incorporating a ComCtl32.DLL ListView implementation in VB to play with.

Here is my problem: I found out that my application did not run on a Win95 machine. To solve the problem, I copied ComCtl32.dll from Win98 to the Win95 machine. After this everything seemed to be working fine.

My question would be the following: Is it safe for me include in the application package the comctl32.dll from win98? Are there many different versions of that comctl32.dll? Maybe a new version of this file came out with Windows2000 or ME and it would be bad to overwrite it with a Win98 version.

Any tips on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[kedaman]

well you should use the version you developed your app with or it could cause problems when running with an incompatible version of the version. I'm sure the later versions with the same filename are backward compatible but you would need to check if it's an earlier version of the file, and then overwrite it in that case. What you also could do is link a page on the net where you can download the laterst version of the control.

[Krass]

Well, latest comctl32.dll files are upgraded with the installation of Internet Explorer 5. I guess most people have them. I think I will hunt for the latest comctl32.dll files (that came with IE 5.5, as I read on microsoft.com) and include these in my package.

Do you think this sounds fair?

But then a question persist, when I will deploy my package, I'm pretty sure it'll tell me it cannot overwrite comctl32.dll because it's already in use. I guess I should just try it out but i'm pretty sure that's what will happen.

Thanks!

[kedaman]

I think that's what setup package and deployment wizards are for, might be you just need to restart once and it will work

[BruceG]

MS provides a download (a small, single exe file, I think it's called "50comupd.exe"), which will upgrade a machine to use the latest version of the Windows common controls. There is a bug in an earlier version of the listview control which may cause a VB program to bomb with the error "Index out of bounds". Updataing the target machine with the latest version of the common controls should alleviate the problem.

If you want to check versions, and see what version was distributed with what program, have a look at the MS DLL database. It's got all the versions and the products they were released with.

Find it at: http://support.microsoft.com/service...p?fr=0&sd=msdn

Cheers

- gaffa