COM/OLE, Old code and Headaches

Question

I'm currently living in 90's and I've been handed this piece of legacy code. I'm not knowledgeable when it comes to COM/OLE/MFC/ATL so I'm asking this, hoping that someone with experience from way back then, could help me to track down this issue.

• What I have is this really old/legacy MFC/ATL application.
• It launches, but eventually crashes in CFormView::HandleInitDialog (atlmfc\src\mfc\viewform.cpp)

The debug output I get is this:

CoCreateInstance of OLE control {6A24B340-7634-11D3-A5B0-0050044A7E1A} failed.
>>> Result code: 0x80040154
>>> Is the control is properly registered?

I know as much that this is due to some component registration failure, or resolution but what I do not know is how to figure out what this dependency is, I have a working old executable of the code, and maybe I could use a bit of reverse engineering to figure out if any DLLs are missing, but I really don't know, I have know idea what OLE is, and I would really appreciate some help on how to debug this.

Answer 1

that looks like it is dxDBGrid.dll. OLE is just Object Linking and Embedding. You need to find the dxDBGrid.dll and make sure it is registered. you can use regsvr32 to register it.

explanation of regsvr32