A little over a year ago the automatic update failed, I've tried all sorts of ways to get an updated version of Windows, but they have all failed. My research seems to point me to a full reinstall of Windows.
But my computer hasn't restarted arbitrarily in over a year!
Decided to upgrade to SSD at the same time since prices have dropped so drastically.
It wasn't required for previous versions of visual studio.
Because windows update is non-functional for so many windows users (mostly due to piracy) we we basically forced to change to static linking to avoid the need for the redist.
Of course, after we changed to static linking we started to run into a bunch of virus scanners giving false positives with their heuristics because all viruses are statically linked.