COM files cannot be found by the system

Hello all,

I'm having an issue that, frankly, I don't understand. I've been developping a VB.NET application for months and today, when I open the solution file, and tried rebuilding it, I am getting several errors, all various permutations of "The referenced component 'SOMETHING' could not be found." There are 5 COM objects that it cannot seem to load (Excel, Office.Core, VBIDE, Word, and OISSERVERLib).

When I go into the References section, I see next to those COM objects, the path is now shown as "<The system cannot find the reference specified>". I've followed the steps outlined here, including updating the reference paths to directly point to the files, but nothing seems to be fixing the issue.

Does anyone know what could be causing this, or (even better) how to fix it? This is the first time in 4 years that I've encountered an issue like this.

I've attached a zip file containing a screen print of Visual Studio showing the errors.

Thank you in advance!

Attached Files

screen.zip (157.0 KB, 2 views)

re: COM files cannot be found by the system

That probably happened after some update to office from microsoft update or something.

Why are you referencing them directly? Shouldn't you be using the ms office interop dll?

re: COM files cannot be found by the system

I am using the interop DLL referenced through Visual Studio. I had attempted to connect to them directly when this error first occured.

But, I'm glad (albeit confused) to report that the issue has cleared itself up. It just started working again yesterday morning. Neither I nor tech support has done anything to my computer, but I'm not going to complain!

Thanks!