Recently, some of our customers reported a bug in Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 that breaks Windows XP targeting with C++ in some scenarios. Specifically, applications using ATL and/or statically linking with MFC will get the following error when run on Windows XP:

“The procedure entry point InitializeCriticalSectionEx could not be located in the dynamic link library kernel32.dll.”

This issue has been fixed in Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 RC1. If you encounter this issue, please download and install this update.