I ran some final tests from a USB stick on Vista and Win7, everything worked great. But when I tested it on a virgin XP system, it threw error 713 “MSSTDFMT.DLL is not registered on this computer.” I looked in the project references and noticed that the data formatter dll was listed, so I unchecked it and recompiled. Same error. Closed the IDE, reloaded the project, made sure the dll was no longer referenced in the project. Recompiled, continued to error-out on the test machine.

I remembered playing around with the DataFormat property on one text box on the main form. I had wanted to see if this property could be used for a time formatter, instead of having to use that awful Microsoft date/time control. It wasn’t useful at all, so I deleted the DataFormat property from the text box. But the compiled exe is still looking for the dll. WTF was going on? I finally loaded the form into a text editor and found this:

BeginProperty DataFormat
Type = 1
Format = "HH:MM"
HaveTrueFalseNull= 0
FirstDayOfWeek = 0
FirstWeekOfYear = 0
LCID = 1033
SubFormatType = 3
EndProperty

Even though I had deleted all reference to this in the IDE, it was still showing up in the form code. I deleted this code block in the text editor, saved the file and recompiled. Finally, it ran without error on all 3 test platforms. Testing completed, I posted the update to the web site. So glad to get this over with, I hate VB and can’t wait to get back to working in Delphi.