First, I'm a little confused. You're response here says not to use vcredist installers, but your previous responses in this thread suggest using vcredist_x86 as a potential solution. My install of the WCL librarys didn't include a vcredist installer, so I downloaded it from Microsoft.
Second, if I follow the how-to and the sample applications, I'm supposed to reference Microsoft.VC80.CRT.manifest. Whenever I include that reference, the installation gets an error and the application doesn't install, so I never get to the dependency error since I can not actually run the app (even on my development machine). But without the manifest, the app installs and runs but only on machines with VS installed (even an old XP machine that I literally dug out of the closet to test my theory). I'm repeating myself, I know, but to me it suggests that there's some other runtime library that's required -- a library included in VS. I ran DependencyWalker against wcl.dll on the old machine (after removing VS) and there were quite a few dll dependencies now missing. I copied those from my development machine but with no change -- still getting the dependency error. Perhaps whatever the dependency is is included in the manifest but since I can't get the install to work with the manifest...
I am developing the app on a 64-bit Windows 7 machine with .NET 4.0, but am publishing it as a 32-bit .NET 2.0 app (since my customer requires that it work on old XP machines). Is it possible that this is why I'm having issues with the manifest file? Should I use the 4.0 manifest even though I'm publishing for 2.0?