Is a long list of dependencies because of a call to RegOpenKeyEx normal?

Question

I have written a little driver DLL which I hope to deploy on a lot of XP machines some of which are bound to have missing dlls and such. Until today my Dll depended only on KERNAL32.DLL and I was happy. I just added a call to RegOpenKeyEx because I need to know that a registry kex exists and suddenly Dependency walker lists a dependency on ADVAPI32.DLL which in turn depends on many many dlls.

Should this be worrying to me that I now depend on 100+ DLLs or will this only cause problems on a system that is so broken that nothing is going to run anyway?

Is there a way to read the registry with less dependencies?

Answer 1

advapi32.dll and all its dependencies are built into Windows.

You don't need to worry; if those DLLs were missing, nothing would work.

(And note that you mustn't try to install any of those DLLs - that will cause problems, not solve them!)