What Are DLL Errors, And How Do I Avoid Them?
DLL files are a critical component to running Microsoft operating systems, and stand for Dynamic Link Libraries. If you think of your computer's operating system as being like the water, power and gas lines under your home, and the various applications you run as being like your television, water heater and sink, you'll get a good idea of what your operating system does. Think of your DLL files as being standardized pipe-fittings, or standardized electrical sockets, and you'll see what kinds of chaos can happen when DLL errors occur.
Now, when Windows is installed, it installs thousands of DLL files, most of which are used routinely by your various applications. Sometimes, applications need a customized version of a DLL file, one with different performance parameters, or a larger memory footprint, than the one that Windows provides, and they overwrite the original (or legacy) file with a newer version. This is all well and good until another application uses that shared file, and doesn't recognize the newer version. Bang – you get a DLL error.
Even worse is a kind of DLL error called "DLL Hell" – fortunately, it's not as common with versions of Windows from Windows 2000 onwards. DLL Hell is a cycle where two applications each load their own version of a common DLL, and neither of them recognizes or uses the version used by the other; this is incredibly frustrating to try and diagnose. It was most commonly encountered with device drivers, and was a pernicious DLL error that came up regularly when installing new hardware. From Windows 2000 onwards, Microsoft has worked hard to check in all the device drivers into the core Windows installer to keep this from happening, and this is the source for a lot of the increased stability in Windows from 2000 onwards.
Now that Windows has signed drivers, the most common DLL error is a missing DLL file. In that case, the appropriate thing to do is to Google the DLL file name and put it in the appropriate directory (usually WindowsLibrary). Related errors are disabled DLL files (when a piece of software disables a DLL file, or doesn't "let it go", or a case where a very old piece of software doesn't recognize the newer DLL file.
Lastly, some viruses and trojans will trigger missing DLL errors, or "fail to load" DLL errors.
If you get a DLL error, don't panic – write down the name of the DLL and do a Google search on it – in most cases, you'll find that it's easy enough to find an older version to recover from. In more extreme cases, you'll need a piece of software called a Registry Cleaner, like RegCure, to go through and sift through your Windows registry and the files on your hard drive to point out the discrepancies, and what programs want which versions. RegCure registry cleaner is a good candidate for this kind of task, and is good for "tuning" your Windows performance on a regular basis. Going back to our earlier analogy of your operating system being the underlying water and electrical lines for your home, RegClean is the equivalent of a plumber that clears out the gunk in the pipes that accrues over regular usage.
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More on Registry Cleaners
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When To Do A Registry Scan on Your Computer
