Q. I bought a laptop with Windows 8.1 and upgraded it to Windows 10. It’s a 64-bit system with an AMD processor. I’m trying to use py2exe to turn a Python script into a standalone executable but I have missing DLLs.

Answer.

TLDR; They’re part of architectural changes to Windows to support multiple devices and system architectures. They shouldn’t be used or linked to directly and should not themselves be distributed. Rather apps and programs should make use of MinCore.lib or MinCore_Downlevel.lib.

In my particular case I excluded those DLLs from py2exe’s process (using py2exe’s exclude_dll option) and the resulting exe generated a missing DLL error on some systems but still ran fine.