Win10 upgrade: impact on video studio

[Davidk]

Like others, I've been struggling with windows10 recently. Specifically, upgrading to it without breaking (in this case) video studio. On the 3rd attempt using lessons learned, I got it to work. This is a summary for those who may be interested.
The major problem turned out to be the MS visual C++ redistributable libraries that VS uses. These are classed community assets, any program can use them, so once installed general practice is to leave them alone - un-install and re-install simply don't change them. And AFAIK, only VS used them on my PC.
Sequence of events
1 - I first tried the MS recommended in-place upgrade - keeping everything. But after it was done, everything else seemed to work but none of 4 VS versions from X9 thru 2019 would display a complete share page after opening - the panel with preview screen was all it got: the program locked up there, task manager needed to recover. All 4 versions failed identically, see screenshot:

after regressing just about every driver on the PC without changing this result, I finally gave this up and tried a clean, new install.
2 - With a clean install, everything is per win10, no leftovers. And after it was done, installing VS x10 gave an immediate clue as to what may be the cause of failure after an in-place upgrade - it asked permission to download C++ re-distributables. Once done, opening X10 and then the share page worked normally. As did all of the other versions.
But a clean install broke a bunch of other essential items, like the disk drive organisation, the printer and the local LAN to a number of NAS devices. So I abandoned it, recovered to win7 and thought about it for several weeks.
And in the process searches turned up reports of incompatibility between the libraries and different runtime versions - see this wikipedia article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_C%2B%2B and the section on compatibility at the end. MS answers confirmed that the C++ runtime is part of the OS, changes/updated for each major OS version. For re-distributable libraries installed under win7, carried over to win10, I could not imagine a worse compatibility scenario, and they certainly did not work when running VS under win10 in the in-place upgrade method.
3 - for the 3rd attempt, I carried out an in-place upgrade (everything else works) with the intent of a complete VS and redistributables re-install after that was done. Before starting the upgrade, there were 17 re-distributables on the win7 platform, see screenshot

These had probably been accumulating since I installed X5 years ago, with various full release and trial versions between.
After the upgrade, the VS and re-distributables un-install and clean up (a tedious process), then re-installed 3 VS ultimate versions (x10, 2018 and 2019), all worked as normal and there were 7 re-distibutables used, different versions to those used by win7 (4 by X10, 3 more by 2018 and none additional by 2019): see screenshot

If I had known this before starting there would have been a lot less stress . . ..

[RobertOZ]

David,
Having followed your progress, through your Win 10 upgrade, I have decided that when the time comes, I will just replace the computer, would appear to be a lot less hassle. Will cost more but at least all the components will be up to date

[Davidk]

Hi Robert,
I spoke too soon. yesterday it all looked good, thus the post.
Today - spent the morning doing editing and thinking I'd finally gotten win10 under control, and then noticed that the repaired share function of X10 (I've got a whole holiday project series in this version) was again not working. sigh. Repeated the repair process. Noticed that the VS versions were inter-acting as installed: install X10 - share OK, install 2018 - share Ok, check x10, share failed.

My intentions are to use VS, not be an on-going windows 10 repairer. So, gave it up and recovered to win7 - again, not without a bit of drama, but it's working, all the VS versions checked twice.

I'm with you - when the hardware fails I may upgrade to win10. OTOH, a win7 backup applied to the new hardware might be a less stressful way to go. In my limited exposure to windows 10 - it looks pretty but win 7 has controls that are easier to use. win10 even has a control panel app that looks like win7, minus a few things like update.

Grrr.