Recently dealt with an issue where a user received errors when launching a large number of both third party and native Windows 7 applications including notepad.exe. Turns out this started after the user installed an application from the internet that required the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 without having the Visual C++ Redistributable installed. Even after uninstalling the application, the error remains.
[the problem]
End user sees the following error when executing a large number of applications in Windows: The procedure entry point <various> could not be located in the dynamic link library <various>.dll.
[solution]
Download and install the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=48145
That’s it.