[thelist] MFC42.dll ... Is this safe?

[Roger Ly]

Rob,

I would say that usually just randomly replacing one DLL with a newer
one could cause more problems than it helps.  In the case of MFC42.DLL,
if you ran "dumpbin /DEPENDENTS MFC42.DLL" you'll see that it
dependencies on several DLLs, most noticeably MSVCRT.dll, KERNEL32.dll
and USER32.dll.  By updating just the MFC42.DLL you run the risk of
these dependencies being broken by referencing older versions of the
DLLs.

That being said, we have had to do something similar with our version of
MFC42.DLL a while back, although we were replacing a DLL that was newer
than the version you are replacing.  It actually worked well.  We ended
up cleaning our set up by installing Visual Studio on the "bad" machine,
thereby updating our DLLs with the most recent ones.

That would probably be the cleanest solution.  I imagine that as time
goes on and you need to update to newer versions of applications or
DLLs, the practice of just blindly copying over newer version of DLLs
will cause to spend a lot of time trying to debug a situation where
everything works on one machine, but for some reason doesn't work on
this particular machine...

Roger