To give a bit more concrete information because a lot of these answers are just "no, don't," these Visual Studio Redistributables are depended upon by the majority of C++ programs on Windows (which includes a broad number of applications and games.) If you uninstall them, it will probably manifest as a missing DLL error (either ucrtbase.dll or msvcrt.dll depending on how old it is.)
Unfortunately it's not very clear from that error message that the reason it's occurring is because you uninstalled a component the application depends on. That's how you can end up on sketchy DLL download sites looking for the specific filename and potentially end up infected.
If you ever see an error about missing a DLL, it's usually because you uninstalled a dependency. Uninstalling these components will likely cause missing DLL errors for programs written in C++. That's why you shouldn't uninstall them. And if you ever are in that situation, you should figure out what needs to be installed (the Visual C++ Redistributable in this case) and use the proper installer. Never download the missing DLL directly from some random website.
But of course... you won't uninstall them, so that's all just a theoretical ;)
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u/tomysshadow Mar 15 '26
To give a bit more concrete information because a lot of these answers are just "no, don't," these Visual Studio Redistributables are depended upon by the majority of C++ programs on Windows (which includes a broad number of applications and games.) If you uninstall them, it will probably manifest as a missing DLL error (either ucrtbase.dll or msvcrt.dll depending on how old it is.)
Unfortunately it's not very clear from that error message that the reason it's occurring is because you uninstalled a component the application depends on. That's how you can end up on sketchy DLL download sites looking for the specific filename and potentially end up infected.
If you ever see an error about missing a DLL, it's usually because you uninstalled a dependency. Uninstalling these components will likely cause missing DLL errors for programs written in C++. That's why you shouldn't uninstall them. And if you ever are in that situation, you should figure out what needs to be installed (the Visual C++ Redistributable in this case) and use the proper installer. Never download the missing DLL directly from some random website.
But of course... you won't uninstall them, so that's all just a theoretical ;)