DLL conflict between SP and EMC Networker

[Elliot Kendall]

I just spent a couple of hours tracking down an installation problem
with the Windows SP. The install would stop at "Starting services" and
then roll back with an uninformative error message. The event log would
show:

Faulting application shibd.exe, version 2.5.0.0, time stamp 0x501c1959, faulting module MSVCR80.dll, version 6.0.6002.18541, time stamp 0x4ec3e3d5, exception code 0xc0000142, fault offset 0x00009f5d, process id 0xdbc, application start time 0x01cdabc5b4b6c444.

The hardest part of diagnosing this was preventing the install from
getting rolled back. I ended up using Task Manager to manually
terminate msiexec.exe as soon as the install window showed "Starting
services." I then ran shibd.exe through Dependency Walker
(http://www.dependencywalker.com/) and found that it was linking to
libcurl.dll from an install of EMC Networker whose library directory
appeared earlier in the PATH than the SP's.

I don't think this particular problem has been posted about before, or
at least I couldn't find it. It produces similar symptoms to this
issue:

https://issues.shibboleth.net/jira/browse/SSPCPP-499

So I'm posting here partially to make the problem easy to find on
Google and partially to get advice from any Windows gurus in the
audience. What's the preferred fix for this kind of problem? All of the
solutions in the DLL Hell Wikipedia article
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLL_Hell#Solutions) sound like they have
to be applied in the application itself or at compile/link time. Should
the Windows SP build be modified to take advantage of one or another?

I've suggested that the administrator update Networker on the box, but
even if that works I don't think it's the "correct" solution.

-- 
Elliot Kendall
IAM Support Engineer - Single Sign On
Information Technology Services
University of California, San Francisco