new-error | grade error creation and serialization library | Dependency Injection library

Whilst talking with the developer community over here, the issue fixed itself. https://github.com/oaubert/python-vlc/issues/170

Our closing comments included our best guess: A Windows internal cache somewhere. I deleted the DLLs from system32 in preparation for doing yet another reinstall. I tested the program, and it picked up the DLL from "C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\libvlc.dll" rather than the /system32/ directory. I strongly suspect that within Windows somewhere, the .dll was cached by something like the preload process or some other obscure bit of Windows. There's no user-facing way to clear some of Windows internal caches. The cache became invalid at some point (3 weeks seems an arbitrary (and rather long) cache period, but Windows is infamously opaque). After that, it genuinely loaded a new version from a new install. Perhaps until then, all my attempts were failing due to a preload cache. That's only a guess.

Correct answer: Just keep trying, even after uninstalling previous versions, manually remove the libvlc.dll and libvclcore.dll , keep restarting, keep checking version numbers. Eventually. it'll start working.