I was cleaning out my system today of all the unused junk I had building up, when I found something interesting.

A lot of programs I install, come with their own special C++ framework - and I have built up quite a collection.

Can you drag the name to make it longer to see the version in full? Thanks.

As far as I know (although i could be wrong here) a ms vs distributeable will not install if there is a same version or later on the system.

Those that look like duplicates are probably the different SP releases. They are also all rather small, a few MB each.

Soooooo, what's the problem?

Guess it's no big problem, as they hardly take any space. Still, some are displayed with duplicate names, and in my mind displaying them at all confuses "normal" users. These are libraries which are dependencies for some programs, they don't belong in a category "Programs and Features".

Here's my list on a system without VS, but has some games and office tools:

Soooooo, what's the problem?

The problem is that things could be better.

If I install Windows from scratch and then install 3 apps, I would like to see a list of exactly 3 apps in my "installed software" list. Not 500. There should be separate lists of user-installed software and automatically-installed stuff.

OP, I feel your pain. It's even worse when you install Visual Studio.

now show me how many d3d... libs you have?

I used to have at least 30, but still half of what I tried to run off the internet would complain that I didnt have the right one

That bugs me too, even when it doesn't really affect anything.