DLL files question

Will someone please educate me on how to register a .dll file into the system registry? I’m having trouble with a new piece of software which tells me that “wmvcore is missing.” I’ve dowmloaded it, placed it (unzipped) into the windows\system directory and tried just about every syntax of the regsvr32 command I can think of. I posted this yesterday, but accidentally submitted it before I was finished. It looks like I got 28 hits but no replies. I know someone out there can help me out. I was fairly proficient with DOS, but windows 98 is all geek to me!

you may need to install windows media player version 9 …
(do a google search for it)

If it’s a valid ActiveX DLL, you should just be able to drag-and-drop it onto regsvr32 or type “regsvr32 wmvcore.dll” at the command line. Not all DLLs support registration (they have to expose a COM interface) but this one should. It’s part of the Windows Media Player, so you might try installing the proper version of that software from Microsoft to get the correct DLL registered.

If regsvr32 is failing, what exactly is the failure message? If it can’t find entry points, it might be a corrupt copy of the DLL or a version/platform conflict. If you can cite the exact error message from regsvr32, searching for help will be more fruitful.

Thanks MICCO. The error message seems to change every time I use different syntax, but when in the windows system directory, I type regsvr32 wmvcore.dll I get a title bar reading RegSvr32. below that is a yellow triangle with a ! inside and the message LoadLibrary(“C:windows\system”) failed
GetLastError returns 0x00000485 (sometimes x00000b)

I believe the 0x00000485 error code is basically “file not found”. Is the wmvcore.dll in the windows system directory when you do this? If it’s not, either put it there (or somewhere else in the system path) or run regsvr32 from wherever the DLL is located. You might also get that error if this DLL depends on some other DLL which is missing. MS provides some dependency checkers, but I’d have to dig up links. If it’s a dependency problem, it’s probably going to be easiest to fix by installing the proper version of the media player that includes this file.

First, does the error message actually say “LoadLibrary(“C:windows\system”) failed”? Or does it actually say “LoadLibrary(“C:\windows\system\wmvcore.dll”) failed”?

If it does say “LoadLibrary(“C:windows\system”)”, then you probably have a path problem with your %sysdir% environment variable, because “C:windows\system” is definitely NOT a valid path :).

If it was just a typo and it’s actually saying “c:\windows\system\wmvcore.dll” in the error message, then have you tried registering using an explicit path in the regsvr32 command? IE, “regsvr32 c:\windows\system\wmvcore.dll” ? I’m assuming you have, since you mentioned that you’ve used different syntaxes.
What error code does that return, if any?

critter42