Rubenerd

Earlier this month I talked about getting a Palm LiveDrive syncing with a Windows 2000 QEMU VM. A few people asked me if it works on other hypervisors, so I tried in Parallels Desktop with the same USB passthrough. It worked, though it had a couple of surprises I wasn’t expecting.

I uploaded my version of the Palm LifeDrive software to the Internet Archive for those missing it. Then attached the extracted ISO to my VM:

-cdrom "Palm LifeDrive Software for Windows.iso"

Autorun showed the palmOne welcome splash screen, and I installed as normal. When it came to detect the Palm though, nothing happened. I tried launching Palm Desktop but got this dialog box:

The dynamic link library MSVCP60.dll could not be found in the specified path C:\Program Files\palmOne;C:\WINNT\system32;C:\WINNT\system;C:\WINNT;[..]

This DLL looked suspiciously like the Visual C++ Runtime, but installing the most recent version that runs on Windows 2000 didn’t resolve this. SYSTEM32 included MSVCP50.DLL, but not version 6. I ended up finding an old newsgroup thread where a Microsoft technician suggested pulling the DLL from the installer:

1. Mount your Windows 2000 installer
2. Go to D:\SUPPORT\TOOLS in Windows Explorer
3. Open SUPPORT.CAB in Windows Explorer and locate MSVCP60.DLL
4. Copy this to C:\Program Files\palmOne

You could put it directly in SYSTEM32, but disk space is cheap now, and I know this specific version works with the Palm software. One does not want a repeat of DLL Hell in 2021!

Now I was able to launch the Palm software. Not sure why this happens specifically in Parallels; maybe their Tools package clobbers something. I’m still impressed they still support Windows 2000 at all.