The PDW looks at your .VBP file to determine the project's dependencies. Then it looks in each required library's .DEP file to find out what each of them are dependent on, and so on. When there is no .DEP file you must manually include any subdependencies.

If you use late binding to any libraries the project will not contain dependency information about them. So you must manually include these libraries and anything they in turn are dependent upon.


In general you do not want to package versions of dependency libraries from the running system. This is why the PDW has its Redist folder. If it finds a library in Redist it will use that copy instead of taking the version from the running system.

If you package from the running system (System32, etc.) you risk deploying wrong versions of the libraries to systems they won't run on. Lots of libraries have been updated to work on newer versions of Windows and will fail if deployed to a downlevel system.

Most people ignore this, and they mostly get away with it (until suddenly they don't). Remember that VB6 programs were only expected to be deployed to Windows 95, 98, and NT 4.0. To handle modern systems you may be forced to do a bit of maintenance on the PDW's files and folders.

Best practices for deploying Visual Basic 6.0 applications
If the Package and Deployment Wizard does not locate the required files in the Redist folder, it tries to locate the files in other folders, such as the System32 folder. This behavior may cause problems because your operating system may contain versions of system files that are not compatible with earlier operating systems. Therefore, make sure that the Redist folder contains the correct versions of any files that the Package and Deployment Wizard copies from your system.