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

Filament

Just a question: Does your application run without those DLLs? Mine doesn't, though it is just a linux command line app compiled on Windows with VS 2005. – Monomer

this happened to me on windows 10. – Romanist

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.

Carrier

It's too bad you can't tell Dependency Walker that IEFRAME.DLL doesn't really need these delayed imports, so that it would stop expanding the tree to show them. (I lost count of how many levels past the interesting stuff they are in the tree for LINK.EXE 9.00.30729.01 on my XP SP3 system with IE8 -- it might have been as many as 10!) – Anallese

Thanks for your answer tyranid, at least I know it is a false error I have the same issue as the original poster when running Dependency Walker 2.1.3623 (dated 2002/04/16 !) on XP's C:\Windows\System32\attrib.exe I am also running WinXP SP3 and IE8. So how does Dependency Walker even know about the existance of Vista or Windows 7 files? – Clarkclarke

I'm unconvinced this is true because I find dependencies on IESHIMS.DLL in code compiled and linked as far back as 2003 - and I just haven't looked further back. More likely these live in the SxS Cache in WinXP and forward and Depends just doesn't deal with it. – Avaunt

Am analyzing both Dlls. IESHIMS.DLL calls seem misleading, but wer.dll is definitely been used (at least in my case) with these calls (will only work from Vista or above) msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/… – Gluttonous

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.

Insobriety

Answer 3

I was having this error w/Citect.

Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Service Pack 1 Redistributable Package MFC Security Update has the missing files.

Bisect

@RagingBull the link could hardly be summed up here, it's a download page. Until SO starts hosting files for its users at least. – Litter

Answer 4

1· Do I need these DLL's?

It depends since Dependency Walker is a little bit out of date and may report the wrong dependency.

2. Where can I get them?

most dlls can be found at https://www.dll-files.com

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

For me leshims.dll can be placed at C:\Windows\System32\. Context: windows 7 64bit.

Slab