This issue was raised on the collada.org forums in this thread: https://collada.org/public_forum/viewtopic.php?t=807&sid=cae5af08d1defd3ae58cf06d48e3130f
A person was having trouble running Refinery on his machine, and I'm pretty sure it's because he didn't have Visual Studio 2005 SP1 installed. For a computer to run Refinery, it'll need either VS 2005 SP1, or the VS 2005 SP1 redist, which is available from Microsoft here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=200b2fd9-ae1a-4a14-984d-389c36f85647&displaylang=en
Using VMware, I confirmed that Refinery won't run on a clean install of Windows XP. Once the VS2005 SP1 redist is installed, Refinery ran fine.
For our other software prerequisites such as the Java runtime, the Refinery installer alerts you if you don't have it installed. No such alert happens for the VS2005 redist though. We should either (a) alert the user if they don't have the appropriate VS2005 redist installed (see this link: http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2007/01/24/updated-vc-8-0-runtime-redistributable-packages-are-included-in-visual-studio-2005-sp1.aspx\), or (b) include the redist with the install.
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I submitted revision 53, which modifies the installer to run the VS2005 SP1 redist. So everything should work great now.