Windows DLL trouble

Today I spend some time working on issues with Windows and DLLs.
First did you see dialog like this complaining about missing EncodePointer function?

This tells you that your Real Studio / Xojo app requires Windows XP with SP2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1 or something newer. You can fix by updating your Windows version or using an older Real Studio version to build the app. (2011r1 works, 2012r2 not)
EncodePointer is used by Visual Studio 2010 runtime to add some security to pointers used in the runtime.

Next did you see this dialog?

This tells you our Tiff plugin needs Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 libraries.
You can download from Microsoft and install them:

Which does fix the problem.

But also for next plugin version we changed the Tiff plugin to no longer depend on this specific version of Visual C++ runtimes. We can do that because all plugins come with static runtime. So having the plugin DLL reference a runtime DLL which is not used does not make sense. We removed the dependency and the issue is fixed.
Actually I never saw the issue before, because VMWare's driver package installs 2008 runtimes already.