SAP Application Fails when SPE is Upgraded. (4266698)

When upgrading the SPE from 5.5.x to 5.6.x on a client machine a number of dll’s that are shared by the SPE and a SAP application are removed causing the SAP application to stop working.

These dll’s are installed/uninstalled as part of the official Microsoft redistributables for VC++ that Password Manager relies on during installation or upgrade.

The following registry key determines how many different applications share a certain dll

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\SharedDLLs\

If there are 2 applications that require a certain dll then the registry key is set to 2

When an application is installed using an msi installer then the value in the registry key is incremented by 1. Likewise it is decremented when an application is removed.

However if an application does not register with the registry key during installation then the value in the key does not get incremented.

So if the value is set to 1 and that one application is removed then the dll is also removed but if there are two applications sharing the dll and the value of the dll is set to 1 then when one of the applications is removed the dll is also removed and the remaining application will not function as expected.

In this particular case the SAP application did not increment the value in the registry key during installation and as a result failed to work as expected after the SPE was upgraded.

Install the C++ redistributables from the 5.5.x installation media as a separate program to get around the problem. This will replace the old dll’s which are required for the SAP application to work and will increment the registry key by 1 without affecting the new dll’s which were installed with the new SPE.

Via GPO 1

• Uninstall the 5.5.x SPE
• Install the 5.6.x SPE

Via GPO 2

•  Install the C++ redistributables from the 5.5.x installation media