Runtime Library mis-matches and VC++ - Oh, the misery!

Question

It seems that all my adult life I\'ve been tormented by the VC++ linker complaining or balking because various libraries do not agree on which version of the Runtime library to

Answer 1

Your points (1) and (2) look correct to me. Another thing to note with (2) is that linking in the debug CRT also gives you access to things like enhanced heap checking, checked iterators, and other assorted sanity checks. You cannot redistribute the debug CRT with your application, however -- you must ship using the release build only. Not only is it required by the VC license, but you probably don't want to be shipping debug binaries anyway.

There is no such thing as COMCTL32D.DLL. DLLs that are part of Windows must load the CRT that they were linked against when Windows was built -- this is included with the OS as MSVCRT.DLL. This Windows CRT is completely independent from the Visual C++ CRT that is loaded by the modules that comprise your program (MSVCRT.DLL is the one that ships with Windows. The VC CRT will include a version number, for example MSVCRT80.DLL). Only the EXE and DLL files that make up your program are affected by the debug/release multithreaded/single-threaded settings.

The best practice here IMO is to pick a setting for your CRT and standardize upon it for every binary that you ship. I'd personally use the multithreaded DLL runtime. This is because Microsoft can (and does) issue security updates and bug fixes to the CRT that can be pushed out via Windows Update.