Crystal Reports deployment somewhat fixed

It seems I've sorta kinda fixed my Crystal Reports problem from yesterday. I say "sorta kinda" because I now have it working on other machines, but I don't know why it's working yet.

After getting close to the point of desparation yesterday, the solution process was simple: start adding things until it works or I reach the same configuration as my development workstation. Thus, I grabbed the Visual Studio .NET 2002 Professional CDs and got to work.

I started from a more or less default Windows XP Pro system running in VMware. I ran the setup package I had built yesterday, but still got the "query engine error" message. So I did a full .NET Framework 1.0 install, but still got the same message. Then I tried the .NET 1.0 service pack 3, but no change.

Next was Visual Studio. Of course, I didn't really want to install VS.NET on the end-user's PC, so I decided to run my test application after every step of the installation process.

It turns out I only needed one step. After the initial "update windows components" step, my test program worked. I don't know why. The only thing it installed were the FrontPage 2002 client stuff and the setup runtime files, whatever they are. I'm guessing the magic was in the latter, as I can't imagine what Crystal Reports has to do with FrontPage, but so far I'm just guessing.

Now I just need to figure out what magic library made the difference. Does anybody have any ideas? I'm pretty sure I didn't miss any of the libraries mentioned in the Crystal documentation. If only there were some kind of diff tool I could use for Windows installations....

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