I am building a VC8.0 (Visual Studio 2005) application that is making use of boost::program_options and boost::filesystem. My application links fine, but when I try to execute the program, I get an error message about a missing "MSVCP80D.dll" (or "MSVCP80.dll" when building for release). I don't have those .dlls on my machine.

MSVCPXX.dll is dynamically-linked STL. It's pretty strange that the standard VS installation didn't install it.

Next error message received is "This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Review the manifest file for possible errors. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem. For more details, please see the application event log."

Well, you can just disable the manifest in your project properties (something like Properties-->Manifest-->generate manifest = No).