It turns out that an ActiveX ".ocx" file needed to be registered: "comctl32.ocx".
I found two things of note: 1. I could make use of the "Procmon" program to try to figure out what the VS IDE was looking for and couldn't find, and 2: the "original" ActiveX file(s) needed to be registered also
what I found was that comctl32.ocx was what the system was craving