Visual Studio 6 Windows Common Controls 6.0 (sp6)

Question

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:

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.

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

I have searched this issue for hours and clicked in hundreds of websites, none of them worked.

My final solution:

1. run:cmd
2. cd c:\Windows\SysWOW64(locate to the location)
3. regsvr32 MSCOMCTL.OCX

this solves the first one. For the second one:

1. run: cmd
2. cd c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319
3. regtlibv12 msdatsrc.tlb

done.

this may not work for everybody (considering the system version reason, etc)

Answer 3

Implementing the two directives already worked for me from within "C:\Windows\SysWOW64"

regsvr32 MSCOMCTL.OCX
regtlib msdatsrc.tlb

It's worth noting that the DOS box should be in Administrator mode. Prior to this, I kept having errors in the vein "Class MSComctlLib.TreeView of control tvTreeView was not a loaded control class" and "Class MSComctlLib.ListView of control lvListView was not a loaded control class".

I am also using Visual Studio 6 on 64 bit Windows 7, with SP6 updates. I was driven here due to the same problem. In my case, I did not need to go through the registry.

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

I get same issue but I was getting error below error when run regsvr32 MSCOMCTL.OCX

The module "MSCOMCTL.OCX" was loaded but the call to DllRegisterServer failed with error code 0x8002801c.

When I run CMD.EXE as Administrator, then it solved my issue.

Some Times VB6.EXE also need o run as administrator to access some registry issue.

Good Luck.