I am getting a lot of people coming to this site, looking for help with “Startup procedure cannot be found in MSDART.DLL” errors. Obviously, information on this type of error is something that people are often looking for. Here is a link to my original post on the issue.

MSDART.DLL contains the Microsoft Data Access “OLE DB Runtime Routines”. MDAC 2.7 SP1 has a version number of 2.71.9031.4 for this file. Not sure about MDAC 2.8 which is now out.

When I did my original Internet search for information on this error, I found several recommended solutions:

1. Try the MDAC Component Checker. This free Microsoft utility will check your system to make sure data access is installed and configured correctly. This tool has only ever told me everything is fine, however, so I don't know how helpful it will be if things are not fine.

2. Rename MSDART.DLL to MSDART32.DLL. If you're encountering this error during a Windows Install, like I was, this might not be easy to do.

3. Just keep clicking OK until the error goes away. Some people report clicking the OK button 200 times or so in order to make it disappear. In my own personal experience, I clicked OK about 20 times before I gave up.

4. Hold down the Control key and keep clicking OK until the error goes away. I don't know what holding the Control key is supposed to do, but some people suggest this anyways.

5. Just wait. I found that the Windows install finished on its own, once I left the computer alone for a few hours. Don't ask me how it did this, but perhaps there is a timeout of some sort.

6. Use the system against itself. Hit Shift+F10 to bring up a Command Prompt. Type taskmgr.exe to bring up Windows Task Manager. Kill the messagebox from there.

I hope these suggestions and links help. As always, understand that there are a lot of possible problems and a lot of possible solutions for any error message, and so what worked for me may not work for you.