::LoadLibrary not working on my Windows XP machine

[VictorN]

But on the XP machine, a call I make to LoadLibrary((LPCWSTR) "MSVCRT.dll") fails with error code 126 (more or less this is file/path not found).

Why do you cast LPCSTR pointer to LPCWSTR? It is a wrong casting. And you do NOT need any casting here at all (I presume your build is an ANSI one)

Now there are about a dozen or so versions of that dll on my XP machine, in addition to the usual one in C:\WINDOWS\system32. Perhaps of the 12, 4 or 5 have different dates.

The you have to pass inn the full path name of the dll you want to load!