console app works on XP but not on Server 2003 -- bad dependency?

I have a C++ console executable module build in VS2008. To run it requires some MS components to be installed, namely:
-- Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package
-- Window Media Encoder 9 Package
The module runs fine on all XP machines I tried but fails to load on a Windows Server 2003 R2 box (more precisely MS Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition SP2). When it fails to load, it produces a very generic error message which gives me no clue as to what is actually going on. The very 1st statement in the module is a printf so since nothing gets printf'd, it seems that the problem might be with one of the above components the module depends on.

Do you to know if there are versions of these modules specifically for MS Windows Server 2003? What else could be going wrong?

thanks much!

What was the error message? What made you assume it has anything to do with the installation? Maybe your program just has a bug.

Just because your program "works" on various computers and fails on another doesn't mean it's an installation issue. Since you provided no real information except "my program doesn't work on another version of Windows", there is nothing that can be stated except for you to actually debug on that machine or do a more thorough job of logging messages in your application as to what's going on.

Regards,

Paul McKenzie

Just pointing out the obvious....did you install the required packages? And additionally packages your application requires but are not installed on Windows Server 2003 by default?

Windows Server is a server operating system and thus restricts many of the standard things Windows has right out of the box.

Furthermore....it would actually help to post the "generic" error message here... ;)