Compatibility with VB6 and Windows 10 Pro 20H2

[ManuelCota]

    Hello,

    VB6 is supported, according to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualstudio/visual-basic-6/visual-basic-6-suppor...

    However, for some reason beyond my understanding, I cannot install the VB6 runtime engine in Windows 10 Pro 20H2, freshly formatted and installed: It fails when registering the com libraries. 

    Does anyone have a solution other than downgrade to Windows 10 1909? Any help is greatly appreciated.

    Manuel

[#2]

@ManuelCota 

Try run it in compatibility mode, take a look at Make older apps or programs compatible with Windows 10 (microsoft.com)

[#3]

@Reza_Ameri-Archived   Thank you very much for your suggestion. I'm afraid it didn't work. 

Funny stuff is that the VB6 redistributable is not the only one that is failing. Also, the mdac distributable is failing too. These two are Microsoft's applications. 

It's like they don't like the string with the new version of windows (some installers check if the version of windows is supported by querying the version as a string).

I'm going to try the VC++ redistributable, in particular regarding the MFC support. Let's see if that installs what 20H2 is missing.

[#4]

@ManuelCota 

This is old version of VB , however I would recommend you to open start and search for feedback and open Feedback Hub app and report this issue.

[#5]

@Reza_Ameri-Archived   Thanks for your suggestion. I did what you suggest:

 * It works on Windows 1903 but,

 * It DOES NOT WORK in Windows 20H2

    Funniest thing is that, if I install it in Windows 1903 and then upgrade to 20H2, everything works.

[#6]

@ManuelCota - Microsoft has stated that some components of VB6 are no longer supported and it's up to the software publisher to distribute the necessary files with the application. Unfortunately, some of the files covered by this support statement were never distributed by the publishers because they were present in Windows after vb6 was installed. I have actually had the vendor in my particular case say the solution is to start with an older version of 10, like 1903, and in place upgrade it to get the application to work. The required files are mostly the .ocx files in c:\windows\SYSWOW64. You can copy these files from an older machine, then use the 32-bit version of regsrv32 to register the OCX files with something like: C:\windows\syswow64> forfiles /m *.ocx /c "c:\windows\syswow64\cmd.exe /c C:\Windows\SysWOW64\regsvr32.exe @file"

[#7]

HI@amreagan , I see your point. Still, note that the VB6 redistributable package AND mdac package are Microsoft Products, thus it was Microsoft who forgot to add additional files to his own packages, which is acceptable since Microsoft has control of what files are already in his operating systems.

I found that this issue is not limited to old components. The VC++ Distributable package from Visual Studio 2005 has exactly the same problem: The installer that comes with the software fails to install. However, if you get the very latest service pack, then the VC++ distributable libraries are installed... which means that all software created with VC needs to be recompiled since VC++ depends highly on the library version.