I have a problem with our executable. I'm running this C++ 32-bit executable on my Windows 7 64-bit development box that also has all those Microsoft applications (Visual Studio 2008 + 2010, TFS, SDK, Microsoft Office)…
And it's still running just fine.

Now I got the client installation of the very same program and was asked to test it with a clean Windows 7 installation. Thus I got one Windows 7 64-bit VMware and updated it to Windows 7 SP 1 (the very same version my developer box is tuning).
But while on my developer box everything is fine the program does not work with the VMware (30 days trial) box.

The x86 Dependency Walker is telling me that the following DLL files are missing:

• API-MS-WIN-CORE-COM-L1-1-0.DLL
• API-MS-WIN-CORE-WINRT-ERROR-L1-1-0.DLL
• API-MS-WIN-CORE-WINRT-L1-1-0.DLL
• API-MS-WIN-CORE-WINRT-ROBUFFER-L1-1-0.DLL
• API-MS-WIN-CORE-WINRT-STRING-L1-1-0.DLL
• API-MS-WIN-SHCORE-SCALING-L1-1-0.DLL
• DCOMP.DLL
• GPSVC.DLL
• IESHIMS.DLL

I googled for those API-MS-WIN-… DLL files and found they should actually already be part of Windows 7 (some sites claiming the belong to Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 though).

I already tried the suggested fixes I found, which are:

• running 'sfc /scannow'
• installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1 runtime executables

But that didn't solve anything. 🙁

Side note: My development box does not have them either, and does not seem to need them. For example, the user32.dll on my box does not link against one of those, while the installation on the VMware does.

Any idea on how to fix this issue?
I tried to find a suitable download / fix on the Microsoft pages, but I failed.

After solving my issue I wanted to report what I found out, and I can't post this as an answer because the question has been closed.

Actually all the DLL files reported missing by the Dependency Walker tool, namely those

* API-MS-WIN-CORE-...

type DLL files were not part of the actual problem.

In my case the registration of three OCX files was missing and after that everything was just fine, BUT Dependency Walker tool still listed all the very same DLL files as before even when the program was just running fine now.

The gist of it: As someone elsewhere stated, the tool is a bit dated by now and does not always work properly with a newer OS. Thus keep an eye open and don't get mislead by missing 'API-MS-WIN-CORE-COM-L1-1-0.DLL', … the problem probably lies entirely elsewhere.