Logitech SetPoint on Windows 8

[time]

Logitech T650 touchpad was a bit flaky under Windows XP, so set up a new boot drive with Windows 8 Home.

The most basic touchpad operations (moving the cursor) work natively with Win XP, Win 7 or Win8, but without SetPoint, it's something of a boat anchor. Unfortunately, the latest 64-bit (or auto-install) version of SetPoint doesn't install properly: clicking on the SetPoint tab under Mouse in Control Panel just exits Control Panel. Running the SetPoint exe directly throws this error:

The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log for more details.

WTF?

 

[Mercutio]

The two things I know can generate that error are using system tools after a pending restart from a PC name change in Windows
or
Mismatched system libraries for .net or Visual C.

Sometimes updating to the latest redistributable for those things fixes that stuff, but I've also encountered .net apps that were so far into dependency hell that I simply could not repair them.

 

[time]

Thing #2 was the problem. There were 250MB of Windows updates pending.

FFS, this is supposed to be a stable new release? They've had 18 months to sort it, but it looks more like M$ is making up the API as they go along.

 

[time]

The T650 is very good BTW.

 

[Mercutio]

I really don't see why the C redistributable needs to be installed with every damned application. Are we assuming that we're installing on a Windows 2000 machine that's never seen an update? It's Microsoft's OS and Microsoft's library file. Why isn't it just being pushed through updates?