When starting Dragonfly on Windows, you may run into an error message looking like this:


The procedure entry point SOME_NAME could not be located in the dynamic link library c:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\some_dll.dll 


This error is caused by dll mixups, due to how Windows dlls work.


Dragonfly uses that same dll (e.g. same file name), but its dll is located somewhere within our installation folder, the intention is to use a local version of the dll.


Other software using the same dll did not behave so well, they instead copied the dll file to the Windows system32 folder, and that dll is already loaded by Windows when Dragonfly is started, resulting in the above error (see this article Windows DLL search order to fully understand what is going on behind the scenes).


The easy way to solve the issue is to move the culprit dll from the Windows system32 folder to the folder of the software that placed them there in the first place, but you need to know which software package placed the dll in the Windows system32 folder. Another solution (a naive solution) is to plain delete the dll from the Windows system32 folder, but this solution can cause the other package to stop working. You can also just rename it in the Windows system32 folder, eventually the other package will complain that it cannot find the dll, you can then move the file to their folder and rename it to original name.


The better solution is a little more involved. To understand the solution fully, you can read this article, concentrating on DLL redirection.: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dlls/dynamic-link-library-redirection 


You need to follow these steps:


-change the registry setting like stated in the article above
-reboot
-create a file named dragonfly_main.exe.local in our installation folder root (so alongside dragonfly_main.exe). The file can be empty as Windows just needs to see a file with that name.
-Find the dll file in the Dragonfly installation folder, searching through the entire folder hierarchy to locate it. When you have found it, copy it to our installation folder root. The most probably locations are

installation_folder\libs or installation_folder\python_env\Library\bin

-start dragonfly normally