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By Amy Carlstrom
Recently I decided to remove a second partition I had put on my hard
drive. I had to format and reinstall Windows. After having done this, I
ran into a bit of a problem with my Visual Basic project files that used
the COMCTL32.OCX dialog control. Upon trying to load them with Visual
Basic (the same version I used to create them, there was no change in
that) it would display the following error message:
'COMCTL32.OCX' could not be loaded -- Continue Loading Project?
Well, I searched the internet extensively for some solution to my
problem. Everywhere I looked, the same solution was presented. I would
need to go into the registry editor, delete the registry key for the
control, then re-register it.
Supposedly, after doing this, everything should have been fine. There
were a few different ways that were offered on how to do this, from
going into the registry editor manually and deleting the key, to using a
program called RegClean. I tried multiple times, using different
approaches, but none of this made any difference.
At this point, I was frustrated. I decided to go into the project files
with Notepad and see what I could find there. Once I had the main
project file opened, I could see exactly where the control was called.
It was at the top of the file and looked like this:
Object={6B7E6392-850A-101B-AFC0-4210102A8DA7}#1.3#0;..\..\..\..\SYSTEM\COMCTL32.OCX
Well, I opened the file of the form that used the control and, surprise
surprise, I found a similar line that looked like this:
Object = "{6B7E6392-850A-101B-AFC0-4210102A8DA7}#1.3#0"; "COMCTL32.OCX"
First, I compared the key, since it listed the key in the files, to the
one in the registry editor, to make sure they matched. Not only did they
match, but it was the key that was listed on the MicroSoft website as
belonging to the control. So I knew that couldn't be it.
Then I checked that it pointed to the correct folder where the control
could be found -- all those dots and slashes do eventually add up to the
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM folder. So it was looking in the right place.
Last, I noticed the part that says "#1.3". I remember from looking in
the registry editor that the folder where the control was registered was
listed as version "1.2". I wondered if that could be it.
Since the project file wasn't working and I had run out of solutions, I
figured I couldn't screw it up any worse. I decided to take a gamble. I
changed the "1.3" in each of the lines to "1.2" and saved both the
project and the form files. I crossed my fingers and loaded the project
up in Visual Basic. Viola! The project loaded with no errors and the
controls were on the form, right where they were supposed to be.
So I'm writing this to you so that you can hopefully add it to your
site, providing a new solution to an old error, and maybe saving someone
a lot of trouble down the line (like I went through).
Thanks Amy!
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