Here's my configuration:

• Computer A - Windows 7, MS Visual Studio 2005 patched for Win7 compatibility (8.0.50727.867)
• Computer B - Windows XP SP2, MS Visual Studio 2005 installed (8.0.50727.42)

My project has some external dependencies (prebuilt DLLs - either build on A or downloaded from the Internet), a couple of DLLs built from sources and one executable. I am mostly developing on A and all is fine there. At some point I try to build my project on computer B, copying the prebuilt DLLs to the output folder. Everything builds fine, but trying to start my application I get

The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0150002)....

The event log contains two of those:

Dependent Assembly Microsoft.VC80.CRT could not be found and Last Error was The referenced assembly is not installed on your system.

plus the slightly more amusing

Generate Activation Context failed for some.dll. Reference error message: The operation completed successfully.

At this point I'm trying my Google-Fu, but in vain - virtually all hits are about running binaries on machines without Visual Studio installed. In my case, however, the executables fail to run on the computer they are built.

Next step was to try dependency walker and it baffled me even more - my DLLs built from sources on the same box cannot find MSVCR80.DLL and MSVCP80.DLL, however the executable seems to be alright in respect to those two DLLs i.e. when I open the executable with dependency walker it shows that the MSVC?80.DLLs can be found, but when I open one of my DLLs it says they cannot. That's where I am completely out of ideas what to do so I'm asking you, dear stackoverflow :)

I admit I'm a bit blurry on the whole side-by-side thing, so general reading on the topic will also be appreciated.