Let me give you, from my personal experience, an insight into the nature of Windows DLL files.
Many, many moons ago, when I bought my first computer, it used to run Windows 98. Everything about a computer was new to me then – I knew nothing. But I was learning fast. Before that, I had used DOS a little, and remembered that I could invoke dot-exe, dot-com and dot-bat files to make them run. This time, I was learning that I could click on dot-mpeg files to run movies and dot-mp3 files to listen to music, and so forth.

But no one had told me what I could do with another type of files, called dot-DLLs. So when I came across a whole folder full of them, buried somewhere deep inside C:\WINDOWS, I was at a loss.

I tried playing them with the movie player – not a flicker.

I tried enqueue-ing them in Winamp – not a toot.

I tried to open them with Notepad, and when some ridiculous garbage came up, I closed the window quickly.

‘I know’, I said to myself. ‘These are virus files. I have become infected.’
So I ran the virus check on them, and nothing showed up.
‘My God,’ I thought. ‘These files seem to be completely useless. I must be able to do something with them! Why, they are not even harmful. All they are doing is sitting there and occupying valuable space.’

Back in those olden days my hard disk was just 2 Gigs, and that was considered high end. And these damned useless DLLs were taking up a lot of that precious real estate. I wanted to free up more space for my songs (I was just learning to rip audio).

So I just went ahead and deleted the whole lot of them. Sure, some of them were stubborn and didn’t want to go at first. They invented imaginative excuses, and stalled me with various types of bogus warning signs, and in general seemed quite reluctant to leave. But I was stern, and firmly showed them the door. And when they were all gone, I did something I had recently learned, to really free up my space – I emptied the recycle bin. You see, I was a quick learner.

The next thing I knew, I was on the phone talking to customer support. For an hour or more, I had them sweating as I swore up and down that I had done absolutely nothing to warrant the present situation, and had no idea why my computer behaved in the unacceptable way that it did. “All I did was free up a little space… ” I said.

• “You did what?”
• “Deleted these annoying bundle of worthless little space-hogging stuff. You wouldn’t believe, you can do nothing with them. They don’t even compress well with Winzip. Lousy useless good-for-nothing rubbish. DLLs, I think they’re called. You’ve probably never even heard of them.”

You can guess whose turn it was to swear then.

So just to make a long story short, don’t delete your DLLs. They’re awful delicate critters, so don’t even look at them. Better still, try not to even think of them. They don’t play, they don’t run, they don’t do nothing useful. Except when they aren’t there, your computer doesn’t work. End of story.

Download RegCure and fix DLL errors.