After installing Office Home and Business 2010, SP1 and all Windows Updates, whenever I try to run Excel, I get this message…
The program can't start because MSVCR90.dll is missing from your
computer.
Try reinstalling the program to fix the problem.
This problem is driving me nuts. I've repaired, uninstalled and reinstalled, used a Microsoft Office 2010 removal tool (Microsoft Fixit 50450), none of which have helped.
Only Excel doesn't work – Word, PowerPoint and Outlook are fine. I also haven't noticed any other applications with any problems. I've tried the C++ 2008 SP1 installer as you suggested, but it's made no difference.
Holding down Ctrl, or adding the command line argument -s doesn't make any difference – the error message is just the same. There don't appear to be any add-ons defined in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Excel or HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Excel.
Best Answer
The MSVCR90.dll is a dynamic link library which is used by programs made in Microsoft Visual C++ 2008. The simplest way to solve the problem is to download the redistributable and install it or reinstall it if it's already installed. Office setup is supposed to do that automagically, but it seems that it's not working.
Here's a link to it.
In addition to that, you may want to download the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package. I'm not 100% sure if Windows update will automatically upgrade regular redist to SP1 version or not. I'm recommending to first get the non-SP1 version because I've heard of people who had problems is they got the SP1 version first.
If you have a 64 bit operating system installed, you should get the 64 bit versions of those downloads too. They're here and here.