I have 2 applications I use rather much, the Visual Basic 4 IDE and Windows media player Version 2.
 
If I were to update the MSDTC in any regard (either by KB913580 or Installing .Net Framework 2.0+) the apps will fail to start. Mplayer2 will show the main window and abruptly exit (it tries to access 0xFEEEFEEE which is failure which it doesn't do without the update). VB 4 will throw the "Unexpected Error; Quitting" Message and proceed to exit. If I try to bypass the quitting any action in the IDE throws "Out of Memory" and exits anyway.
 
While I can easily replace mplayer2... I can't replace VB4 (I find VB6 too confining and Vb2005 slow and unstable). There was an MS patch to install the old version but I can no longer find it.
 
My question is, what precisely is going on with MSDTC and is there any way to safely update it without losing VB4? (Searched and have found no related answers to this thus far with google + MS searches)
 
(Note: Only the VB4 IDE fails, exes compiled still run without incident, so far anyway)
 
Win XP-SP2; 1gb ram; athlon 1.4ghz; sis635-ecs K7S5A