I've had a bit of a trawl round the web for this and I reckon it might be worth installing (or re-installing) Visual Studio 6 Service Pack 5, Visual Studio being the 'family' of development languages that includes Visual C++.
You can get it from the Microsoft site
HERE but please note that it's a 58Mb download so you'll need broadband. The install assumes that you've already got Internet Explorer 5.5 or later. If you haven't, then I'd recommend getting up to IE6 SP1 anyway and then see if you've still got the problem!
Hope that helps - let us know