MSVCP71.dll

Hello.  I've had a laptop for about 2 years with Vista OEM version. Out of the blue, per discussions with AOL, I now have an AOL 9.0 / Vista incompatibility issue -- AOL being no help and pointing the finger to Microsoft saying that I need resolution through Microsoft that the problem may be due to a Windows update installation. What happens is that I go to my AOL desktop icon, click on it, and, instead of AOL successfully launching into a sign-in screen, I now get a message box for waol.exe - unable to locate component that states "This application has failed to start becuase MSVCP71.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix the problem." If I go through Internet Explorer and get into AOL that way, it is just a matter of time before I get an error message that AOL software stopped working and I end up having to Ctrl-Alt-Del to get out of the things I was working on, because the error message keeps popping up so quickly I don't have a second to x out of the error box and close the program. Any have any suggestions where I won't lose my files, emails, archives, etc. to fix this horrible problem?  Thanks.