I’ve been looking to set up a DLNA server, and after a quick test on my desktop (Win7/x64) computer I decided to try installing Mezzmo 3.1 on my headless WinXP server this morning. It didn’t go well... the software appeared to install, but the service was never created, and the console wouldn’t start, complaining that:

The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0150002).

Eventually it occurred to me to look at the Event Viewer (under Administrative Tools in the Control Panel), where I found, in the System log:
Code:
Event Type:	Error
Event Source:	SideBySide
Event Category:	None
Event ID:	32
Date:		3/30/2013
Time:		10:31:38 AM
User:		N/A
Computer:	PHOENIX
Description:
Dependent Assembly Microsoft.VC80.CRT could not be found and Last Error was The referenced assembly is not installed on your system.
It seems there are quite a few versions of this redistributable; eventually, I discovered that installing the one here:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/downl...s.aspx?id=3387
made it possible to install and use Mezzmo.

Probably this happened because I was using a recent installation of Windows XP SP3 with very little added... I presume this has gone unnoticed because most folks running that operating system will have already picked up the right version of the prerequisite redistributable somewhere else.

I wanted to make this note so that anyone else having this problem might be able to solve it more quickly than I did; and to remind Conceiva to include the prerequisite redistributable, or at least have the installer check if it is missing and tell the user what to do about it. I’m stubborn—most people would have given up and assumed it just “doesn’t work.”