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

While waiting for a reply for ideas here, I had decided to try something. I ran regedit as administrator, navigated to the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib Key and then did a search for "MSCOMCTL.OCX"... I deleted EVERY key that referenced this .ocx file.

After searching the entire registry, deleting what I found, I ran command prompt as administrator. I then navigated to C:\Windows\SysWOW64 and typed the following commands:

regsvr32 MSCOMCTL.OCX
regtlib msdatsrc.tlb

Upon registering these two files again, everything is WORKING! I scoured the web for HOURS looking for this solution to no avail. It just so happens I fixed it myself after posting a question here :( Even though Visual Studio 6 is outdated, hopefully this may still help others!