We’ve recently had more than two reports of a ThumbsUp.dll error during the install of SketchUp 2019 on Windows. The dialog, which is part of the Microsoft installer, says something about how you should contact your support department. I think that Microsoft had it in mind that you would talk to your own IT team, but not surprisingly people call us instead!
If you search the forum you’ll see that this has come up a number of times in the past, and there are a handful of suggestions on how to get around it. One of those suggestions does seem to be the fix in the recent variation of the problem, and we have been sending the related steps to people who have emailed in about the problem.
We haven’t heard back from those people to say that it worked, so we can only take the silence to be a good thing. Still, we’ve been wondering if it did fix things.
Yesterday I was on a phone support call, where doing a fresh install of 2019 was one of the things we needed to do, and the ThumbsUp.dll problem happened. That gave me a chance to test the steps we have been sending out. These are those steps:
- In the Type here to search box, type ‘add’, or enough for the Add or remove programs option to show up. Open Add or remove programs.
- In the Apps & features section is a ‘Search this list’ text entry box. Type ‘c++’. That gives you a list of all of the versions of Microsoft Visual C++ that are installed.
- Scroll to the bottom of the list.
- Click on, and Remove, any versions that are later than 2013. In cases we’ve seen, that means the 2017 one, and the 2015 one.
- Install SketchUp 2019 again.
The C++ libraries that are in SketchUp 2019 are a bundled set, call 2015-2019. It seems that when installing the 2015-2019 version it clashes with either the 2015 or 2017 version that is already installed.
It solved the problem on the phone call, and we think has solved it for email reports too. Hopefully it will work for you as well, if you got to this post while searching for ‘ThumbsUp.dll’!