Windows Live and missing .dll files

Windows is not normally a topic I cover here on this blog but I have a number of friends and family members that I offer PC support to. Today one of those friends from my church contacted me as she had a problem with her laptop that I recently installed Windows 7 onto for her.

The laptop was having problems with booting, sometimes it would and at others not but she was getting scary messages about something not being right with the PC when it did boot. My first inclination was possibly the HDD was on the way out.

Anyway I went round and found out the issue was with the DVD drive as a disc had been left in it for several months and it was set as the first boot device. Once this was removed the PC booted OK but to be on the safe side I ran a disc check. after completion of this no HDD errors and PC boots OK but when trying to access windows live mail it would not start and was giving an error message that the WLDCore.dll file was missing and windows live mail would need to be reinstalled to rectify the issue.

Problem being I couldn't access the software to back up contacts and email and was not sure if a reinstall would cause all this data to be lost (I suspect it would). A quick search of the internet relieved that this is not an uncommon problem, Windows Live must be quite a flaky application given the number of Help requests I found for the same error.

Luckily a member of the community had found a solution that did not involve re-instillation of windows live. This involved going into the windows live program files shared folder and copying the wldcore.dll and wldlog.dll files from there back into the respective Messenger, contacts and mail folders. This done I reopened Live mail and it started fine. While I was there I showed my friend how to back up mail and contacts just in case.

What bugs me is that given the number of Help posts I found with a similar problem some going back to 2011 Why have Microsoft not fixed the issue yet, if this had been an open source problem this bug would have been fixed ages ago. All Microsoft can offer is reinstall the programme to fix it (that was the official advice in the Microsoft solution centre), not stop the problem happening in the first place.

Lucky for me and others the Community came to the rescue with a simpler solution which did not involve the risk of data loss.

 This was the post that rescued my day:

Thank you to elliottme11 on the Microsoft community site for this solution and saving me a lot of grief in the process.

As for my own day to day computing needs I'll stick with LINUX it does not break its own applications when you do a disc scan.