I tried to call vcvars32.bat, but had the same problem. I have to give additional information to you i think: I compiled perl with 'mingw' and 'dmake', because i want to use a module (Tk::WinPrint) which only compiles with the mingw environment. (The coder of the module told me). The libs are installed on my system in the MS Visual Studio 6 -path. But if i hadn't installed MSVC6 I won't have them. Shouldn't this libs come with mingw, too??? I tried to copy them to the windows/system32-directory but the problem was still there...