The ordinal 242 could not be located in the dynamic link library Anaconda3\Library\bin\mkl_intel_thread.dll

Question

I have just installed Anaconda 5.3 64-bit (Anaconda3-5.3.0-Windows-x86_64) on Windows 10 and am getting this error when trying to run Spyder.

pythonw.exe - Ordinal Not Found

The ordinal could not be located in the dynamic link library C:\Users\username\Anaconda3\Library\bin\mkl_intel_thread.dll.

I used Dependency Walker to view the functions in the DLL and see that ordinal 242 is there. The function associated with ordinal 242 is mkl_blas_zherk.

Could anyone help me fix this or direct me to a resource to help me figure it out myself?

Answer 1

The quick answer:

set CONDA_DLL_SEARCH_MODIFICATION_ENABLE=1 

I set a user environment variable for this.

The official answer is here.

Answer 2

If you are running Python/IPython from a console, check the priority of libiomp5md.dll using where, i.e.:

where libiomp5md.dll 

This may show a few absolute paths (one per line) to different libiomp5md.dll files. A healthy setup should list Anaconda's at the top (e.g. C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\Library\bin\libiomp5md.dll), and if there are any others listed below, they can be ignored as they have lower priority.

However, if you see a different libiomp5md.dll path at the top, then this will be loaded first, and may conflict with Anaconda's DLLs. If this file is in the current directory, then either change directory to a folder without this file, or (if possible) delete or rename the conflicting DLL file. If it's in a different folder, then you may need to re-arrange your PATH variable to move Anaconda's before other paths.