Some help needed - Entry point not found

[TimeLord11 0]

Hello, I was directed to here after contacting Ultimaker in Facebook.
If this is not the right forum then please refer me to the right one 🙂
I have a problem which I can't solve:
I have an HP Pavilion laptop running Windows 8.1, 64 bits.
Up until few days ago it worked perfectly fine, I had on it the latest version of Cura, V4.6.
Then due to a problem that seems to come from an update to Windows I had to do a refresh to repair my computer, with that all programs including Cura were lost.
I tried to re-install Cura 4.6 only to get an error message about missing DLL files, I downloaded a total of 24 DLL files (as instructions said I need both 32 and 64 bit versions of them) and placed them in the right windows folder in hope that this would solve the problem, but sadly it does not.
I now get the following error:

 

I have tried to install older versions of Cura and I still get this error, the only version that actually does work is 15.04.6

Is there anything I can do? I don't have enough money right now for a new computer, nor do I have the original installation disk of Windows 8.1

Thanks ahead.

[SandervG 1,315]

Hi @TimeLord11, thank you for your message and welcome to the community. @nallath, do you know? Thanks! 

[ahoeben 983]

I have not used Windows 8 in a long while, but as far as I know Cura should just work on it. Unfortunately, if you download dll files and put them somewhere on your system, that gets your system in a state where we don't know what versions of what files are where, making it harder to help you. Do you still have a list of dll files you installed?

 

It sounds like the "Visual C runtime redistributables" are corrupted and/or have mismatching versions. The Cura installer comes with these redistributables and offers to install them for you. It could be that the installer thinks a newer version is already installed on your system (especially if you make a habbit of manually downloading DLLs and putting them on your system). You could try uninstalling any and all "Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable" from your system, and then install Cura again. NB: this may affect other applications on your system.

[TimeLord11 0]

It was the first time that I downloaded DLL files in order to solve something like this.
Before that I tried to re-install Cura but got error messages about the missing DLL.
I tried to ask on Facebook in a 3D printing group, but the only person who replied refused to help me when he found I still use Windows 8.1
On the site where I downloaded the files the instructions were that each 32bit version of the DLL to be copied to the folder
C:\Windows\SysWOW64, and each 64bit version of the files to be copied to C:\Windows\System32.

 

List of the missing files is:
api-ms-win-crt-conio-l1-1-0.dll
api-ms-win-crt-convert-l1-1-0.dll
api-ms-win-crt-enviornment-l1-1-0.dll
api-ms-win-crt-filesystem-l1-1-0.dll
api-ms-win-crt-heap-l1-1-0.dll
api-ms-win-crt-locale-l1-1-0.dll
api-ms-win-crt-math-l1-1-0.dll
api-ms-win-crt-process-l1-1-0.dll
api-ms-win-crt-runtime-l1-1-0.dll
api-ms-win-crt-stdio-l1-1-0.dll
api-ms-win-crt-string-l1-1-0.dll
api-ms-win-crt-time-l1-1-0.dll