What Is A DLL File?

April 28, 2008

Okay, so you’ve probably heard a lot about “dll files” and perhaps you’re wondering what these are? Without getting overly technical, a DLL file is a supporting library file to an application in Windows. DLL actually stands for “dynamic link library” and it functions as a “helper” of sorts to another application. Think of a DLL file has as a supporting actor or actress — they’re not the star of the show, but without their function and presence they often render the lead actor useless!

Oftentimes a DLL file is not even in the main program directory where the executable resides. DLL’s will often be in the “system” directory, which on many Windows operating systems is “C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32″. You may not even realize it, but I’ll bet your PC has a few hundred (or maybe more) DLL’s right now. In my system directory alone, I have over 1400! Here’s the tail end of a “dir *.dll” in my system directory:

09/28/2006 06:56 PM           316,416 WUDFx.dll
04/16/2007 10:47 PM            33,624 wups.dll
04/16/2007 10:45 PM            43,352 wups2.dll
04/16/2007 10:43 PM           203,096 wuweb.dll
08/18/2006 08:37 AM           383,488 wzcdlg.dll
08/18/2006 08:37 AM            52,736 wzcsapi.dll
08/18/2006 08:37 AM           476,160 wzcsvc.dll
08/04/2004 08:00 AM            91,648 xactsrv.dll
08/04/2004 08:00 AM           174,200 xenroll.dll
08/04/2004 08:00 AM           129,536 xmlprov.dll
08/04/2004 08:00 AM            50,176 xmlprovi.dll
03/01/2006 03:42 PM            11,776 xolehlp.dll
08/04/2004 08:00 AM           438,784 xpob2res.dll
08/04/2004 08:00 AM           187,392 xpsp1res.dll
08/04/2004 08:00 AM         2,897,920 xpsp2res.dll
10/29/2007 06:04 AM           350,720 xpsp3res.dll
03/23/2007 06:07 AM           583,504 XPSSHHDR.dll
03/23/2007 06:07 AM         1,683,280 XpsSvcs.dll
11/01/2006 02:52 AM           765,952 xvidcore.dll
11/01/2006 02:54 AM           180,224 xvidvfw.dll
08/04/2004 08:00 AM           337,920 zipfldr.dll
1437 File(s)    348,196,327 bytes
0 Dir(s) 43,477,467,136 bytes free

1437 files! Yikes.

Now as you can imagine, that’s a whole lot files for your operating system to manage. Luckily, Windows XP and other modern day OS’s do a good job of figuring out which DLL’s are associated with applications. But, every once in a while, your system might bark at you with some sort of error - either not being able to load the DLL, not being able to allocate sufficient memory to it, etc. Perhaps you’re getting a DLL error now and that’s why you’ve landed on my site?

Well, there are two main ways you can fix DLL errors -

1) The first way is by trying to replace/redownload the missing or broken DLL in question. I don’t have them here on my site, but there are a few sites which archive various versions of these files. Try browsing over to http://www.dlldll.com to see if they have what you need. If not, try this one: http://www.softwaretipsandtricks.com/dll/.

2) If you try the above and it doesn’t work, you need to run a software tool that tries to fix the error for you. To that end may I suggest RegCure? Among other things, RegCure does a goob job of removing DLL’s that are no longer needed on your system, reassociating unlinked DLL’s with their primary installed application(s), and a lot of other technical stuff that’s a bit over my head! RegCure isn’t free, but it usually does the job…

I hope that information helps — any questions please let me know in the comments…

Cheers!

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