Date:	01-12-2002
	Title:	"Object library not registered" error when attempting to run eVB
	Author:	Gene Ostrowski

Summary

This article discusses a solution to an error message that appears when you try to run eMbedded Visual Basic after installing additional applications on the machine.  When you try to run eVB and create a project for the PocketPC device, you receive an error message indicating that there is an "Object library not registered" error.  Re-installing the eVB and eVC products do not fix the problem.  Reinstalling the OS won't fix the problem either.

Product Affected

This problem seems to affect only the eMbedded Visual Basic 3.0 product, but could also affect other applications, since it is a pretty generic problem.  The operating system affected in my case was NT Server 4.0, SP6a.

Background

I ran across this little nastiness one afternoon when attempting to work on one of my Visual Basic applications.  I had just finished rebuilding my server, and installed the eVC and eVB toolkits.  Once everything was working properly, I decided that I wanted to have some additional applications on the development server, namely Microsoft Office 2000. 

Once I finished installing Office, everything seemed OK.  However, a week later when I decided to do some development on an old eVB application--- blam!  I received the error message and was unable to create new projects or even open up existing projects for the PocketPC platform.  The other platforms, such as HPC, seemed to work correctly.  However, when I tried to create a new project for the PPC platform, I noticed that the toolbar controls were all missing after I received this error message.

I tried to remove and reinstall the toolkits, but the problem did not go away.  It seemed that one of the controls .DLLs or .OCXs was missing or corrupt (or worse, overwritten with an older version).

I searched the web high and low, and could only find one single reference on how to solve this problem.  It was a thread on a newsgroup somewhere (I did not save the link).  I've written this article to hopefully save someone a day's (or week's) worth of work if they run into this issue.  Hopefully, the search engines will index this page and it may be of assistance to someone.  At any rate, there will now be at least two references on the web for how to resolve this problem.  :)

The research seemed to indicate that these files are used by any application that uses Visual Basic for Applications and how they work with the ActiveX desktop controls.  For whatever reason, installing Office 2000 caused something to get horked, so the file was no longer registered.   To make matters worse, I tried to discover how to re-register the controls into the system.  It seemed that REGSVR32.EXE did not like the offending file, since it was not a DLL or an OCX file.  I needed to find a way to register this file. 

Solution

The solution is to re-register the proper control onto your system.  The offending control is VB6PPC.OLB, which should be located in the \Program Files\Microsoft eMbedded Tools\EVB directory on your development server. UPDATE! (3/13) Several users have noted that on the PocketPC 2002 version of the OS, the filename is VB6PPC2.OLB.  Kudos to Terry Davis for being the first to bring it to my attention.

Additional research revealed that I needed to run a program called REGTLIB.EXE against this file in order to re-register it properly.  Unfortunately, I could not file this REGTLIB.EXE  file anywhere.

All the information that I was gathering indicated that the REGTLIB.EXE file is included on the installation of Visual Studio.  I checked all of my development servers and could not find the file.  I then searched to original CDs on both the Visual Studio 6.0 product (the Enterprise edition, no less!) and the eMbedded toolkits product, but could STILL not locate it.  If it is included on one of the installation CDs for these products, it is either compressed or buried in a .cab file somewhere.  Alas, I finally discovered that this file is included in several other installation packages, namely IE 5 and others.  I was able to obtain the file by installing the Microsoft Windows Library Update patch, found at Microsoft's website.  Once I ran the patch, the REGTLIB.EXE file was sitting in my c:\winnt directory. UPDATE! (3/13) It's my understanding that the REGTLIB.EXE file is installed when you update Visual Studio with Service Pack 3.  Note that I said Visual Studio and not eMbedded Visual C++)

Steps Necessary To Fix The Problem

1a) Download the Windows Library Update Patch from Microsoft, or get it here.  Note that the file included on *this* site is the US English version of the file.  You may want to go directly to MS and get the file.  Type in "Windows Library Update Patch" into their search box and you should get to where the file is located.

- OR -

1b) Or  you can first try to download just the REGTLIB.EXE file here and go to step 3.

2) Install the patch, and reboot your system.

3) Start a command prompt and go to the \Program Files\Microsoft eMbedded Tools\EVB directory on the machine.

4) Run the following command : REGTLIB VB6PPC.OLB (Update: the filename is VB6PPC2.OLB on PocketPC 2002 OS).

5) You should see a message indicating success.  You should now be able to run eVB properly.

Note that this solution worked fine for me.  It may be that in my case, my server had the proper combination of OS version, software, etc. that allowed this to work.  I followed the steps above and it worked fine for me.  You may be able to just download the REGTLIB.EXE file and re-register it and everything will be ok.  I don't know for sure.  Then again, maybe this won't work at all in your case.

Therefore, I cannot be held responsible if doing this blows up your machine.  Who knows what happens when you muck around with the registry on these machines?  Note that I performed these steps on an NT 4.0 server box.  These steps may not work on other operating systems (such as 2000), so do this AT YOUR OWN RISK.  And as always, BACKUP YOUR MACHINE before you do anything like this....  of course, I don't need to tell you this.  The chances seem pretty low that anything bad could happen from just registering some desktop controls, but who really knows for sure these days...

Conclusion

Hopefully, this article helps someone else get out of the same jam that I was in.  I was dreading the thought of having to rebuild my server yet again to resolve this issue.  After installing the patch and re-registering the controls, I was back in business in no time. 

If this article helped you at all, please drop me a note at gene@baysidestudios.com and let me know.  It's nice to hear that I was able to help out.

Update! (3/13) - I'm glad I wrote this article.  I've received many emails of thanks from users who have been struck by this horrid problem and were unable to get out of the jam without the help of this article.  I'm thinking that I need to start writing more of these and start building a documentation library of fixes for these types of problems...

BTW, Terry Davis notes that apparently Microsoft has come around and discovered it's a problem.  They even wrote a Q article about it on their support site (Q315576).

Allan Malcom wrote in to tell me that the problem happens on Windows2000 Professional SP1 as well, but that the fix still works.  He stated that he has both the 2002 and the 2000 versions of the SDK installed, and that not both of them were corrupted.  I suspect that if you run into an issue where they are both corrupt, you could re-register both of the OLB files independently...   Thanks Allan!

Regards,

Gene Ostrowski