Visual Studio 6 Windows Common Controls 6.0 (sp6) Windows 7, 64 bit

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I was asked to help work on a legacy vb6 application for someone, so I decided to toss Visual Studio 6 on my Windows 7 x64 laptop following this guide.

It installed fine, and from I can see everything is working except for Microsoft Windows Common Controls 6.0 (sp6). Microsoft Windows Common Controls-2 6.0 (sp6), Microsoft Windows Common Controls 5.0 (sp2), etc. all work just fine. However, when I try to add the Microsoft Windows Common Controls 6.0 (sp6) component I get the error:

'' could not be loaded

I could not add an image, so I have uploaded a screen shot to here for anyone wanting to see it exactly:

http://i.imgur.com/7aym4xB.png

I have tried registering/un-registering/re-registering MXCOMCTL.OCX, MSCOMCT2.OCX, msdatsrc.tlb all with no success. I have also uninstalled a known security update that may have caused issues with Windows Common Controls. I have removed IE11, even though reports state IE11 will not cause issues with MSCOMCTL.OCX the way IE10 did.

I run VB6.EXE in Windows XP SP3 Compatibility mode. With Disable visual themes, Disable desktop composition, and Disable display scaling on high DPI settings. As well as run it as administrator.

I have also attempted to open a previous project that utilizes this control, and it fails during load with the same "blank" error as in the screen shot with the following in the generated error log:

Line 35: Class MSComctlLib.ListView of control lvData was not a loaded control class. Line 223: Class MSComctlLib.StatusBar of control Stat was not a loaded control class.

So that tells me it isn't a version issue within the .vbp like some suggest (as it happens with new, blank projects as well).

I am at wits end. Apparently people have gotten both VB6 and Windows 7 x64 to work properly (with Windows Common Controls) but NOTHING I have tried alleviates my problem. I am hoping someone here may have run into this, or have some ideas as to what is going on.

13 Answers

Open Registry Editor using run command regedit.

Locate HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib Key and then did a search for "MSCOMCTL.OCX" and deleted EVERY key that referenced this .ocx file.

Open command prompt (cmd) in Administrator mode. The type the following code,

In 32 bit machine,

cd c:\Windows\System32
regsvr32 MSCOMCTL.OCX
regtlib msdatsrc.tlb
regsvr32 MSCOMCT2.OCX

In 64 bit machine,

cd c:\Windows\SysWOW64
regsvr32 MSCOMCTL.OCX
regtlib msdatsrc.tlb
regsvr32 MSCOMCT2.OCX

I believe it may be related to a issue in which Microsoft released a update to the MScomCtlLib which was incorrectly patched by microsoft, causing registry errors.

I believe if you follow the advice laid out in:

https://support.microsoft.com/fr-fr/kb/2597986

I had the same problem running windows 7-64 with VB6. I tried the unregister and re-register solutions above but it did not solve the problem. Then I noticed that in my VB6 Components I had references to both the Microsoft Windows Common Controls -2 6.0(SP6) and Microsoft Windows Common Controls -3 6.0(SP5). I removed the SP5 reference and all now works OK. It seems that -2 6.0 SP6 supersedes -3 6.0 (SP5) and when both are present there are two references to the same control. Hope this helps. Steve

My solution was replacing the MSCOMCTL.OCX on windows 10 box with one from a Windows 7 box that also had MS Access installed. For some reason, there are different MSCOMCTL.OCX 2.0 controls with the same name.

I know this sounds crazy, and might not help anyone else, but we have saved this MSCOMCTL.OCX with a readme file and it has fixed our new install errors every time.

we unregister the current MSCOMCTL.OCX that came with Windows 10 box, delete it, and register the old one we have saved.

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