Dependency Walker reports IESHIMS.DLL and WER.DLL missing?

Question

On a Windows XP Professional SP3 with Internet Explorer 8 box, when I run Dependency Walker on an executable of mine it reports that: IESHIMS.DLL and WER.DLL can't be found.

1. Do I need these DLL's?
2. Where can I get them?

I believe they are supposed to located in C:\Windows\System32\Wer.dll and C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\Ieshims.dll

Answer 1

ieshims.dll is an artefact of Vista/7 where a shim DLL is used to proxy certain calls (such as CreateProcess) to handle protected mode IE, which doesn't exist on XP, so it is unnecessary. wer.dll is related to Windows Error Reporting and again is probably unused on Windows XP which has a slightly different error reporting system than Vista and above.

I would say you shouldn't need either of them to be present on XP and would normally be delay loaded anyway.

Answer 2

I had this issue recently and I resolved it by simply rolling IE8 back to IE7.

My guess is that IE7 had these files as a wrapper for working on Windows XP, but IE8 was likely made to work with Vista/7 so it removed the files because the later editions just don't use the shim.