Yes, that error. I've been driven to distraction trying to figure this out. I've been working on an SDL-based game, built with Visual C++ 2005 Express. I am generating a manifest, and it runs just fine on my machine. I've tried manually redistributing the msvc?80.dll files with the game, and asking my friends to run the vcredist executable. Neither works, and the error is invariably "This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.". Any ideas as to what I might be doing wrong? It *is* worth noting that I am developing on a 64-bit machine, but I'm building a win32 executable.

Read MSDN on application deployment.

I did that already. Several times. That's the problem. I followed the instructions (running vcredist on the target machines) for deploying using XCopy, and it didn't work. Is there some subtlety I might be missing?

Your app and all .dlls used by it are linked against the release runtime?

You could try depends.exe as described here to diagnose the problem.

Yes, I am using the multi-threaded DLL linking option (not debug DLL). And all of the libraries I'm linking to are the release versions.