Visio Viewer 2016 Not Working On Windows 7

Recently I have been troubleshooting an issue I had with Visio Viewer 2016 on Windows 7. The application appears to install just fine, all Visio drawing files appears with the correct icons and is now associated with Internet Explorer. But once you open the file, the plugin or viewer does not load in Internet Explorer.

Visio files appear to be associated correctly.

But plugin does not load in Internet Explorer

At first, I thought this might have something to do with ActiveX Killbits, because when I tried to research the error, it appears the Visio Viewer Active X control was blocked. And there was even a suggestion that if the specific registry which blocks Visio Viewer was removed, Visio would launch.

Hmm, curious indeed. So I check the machines registry keys. Hey, {279D6C9A-652E-4833-BEFC-312CA8887857} is listed in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ActiveX Compatibility!

If I check the 32bit registry node, there is also an Alternate CLSID.

This CLSID belongs to Visio Viewer.

Ok, so seems legit. So i delete the registry keys for Visio from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ActiveX Compatibility. But had no luck.

Maybe it was Internet Explorer security settings? Change everything to the lowest secure settings. Nope.

Maybe there is a crash or something in the Event Viewer? Nope.

This was getting frustrating. But since Visio Viewer was a control Internet Explorer loaded, maybe where is some dependency it needed, but what?

I opened up the Visio dll file in Dependency Walker. This is a tool which analyses dependency linkage between executable files. So if a DLL or EXE files has several dependencies, Dependency Walker will show this. So i opened up the file C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office16\VVIEWER.DLL in Dependency Walker, and indeed, there were some missing dependencies.

The missing files all appeared to be related. If I searched the current machine, similar files were available.

Not sure what to make of this just yet, I tried the most desperate (or smartest if you will) thing and searched Google for one of the filenames. Google matched several DLL websites, but number 3 on the list of results was a link to an update from Microsoft.

The description of the update seemed to make sense, why the file would be missing from a Windows 7 machine, and why Visio Viewer 2016 would needed. Anyway, I quickly downloaded the update for Windows 7 x64, and tried installing it. Then I launched the Visio drawing again.

It worked!

And so now Visio Viewer 2016 works on Windows 7. Hope this helps you out if you were having the same problem.