The purpose of this post is to indicate that something with the MS-Windows 32bit, idl_lapack.dll under in IDL 8.7.3 seems to be wrong.
Background:
I have a IDL program which requires 32bit MS-Windows libraries. With IDL 8.7.2 and using the make_rt command, I successfully built an IDLVM in which my program works fine. When I do the same under IDL 8.7.3, running the program in the 8.7.3-based IDLVM will crash with the error message:
Plot: Error loading sharable executable. Symbol: IDL_Load, File=
\bin\bin.x86\idl_lapack.dll The specified module could not be found.
I assume this dll is required from the IDL routine "image", which is used to display imagery data.
The file idl_lapack.dll is available in the IDLVM. However, in IDL 8.7.2 this file is of size 2.05 MB while in IDL 8.7.3 the file size is 28.4 MB. The much larger file size in IDL 8.7.3 seems to indicate that this is now a statically compiled library, yet something must be wrong in this 32bit dll.
For now my solution is to compile the IDL-sav file under my IDL 8.7.3 environment and then use this sav-file in the IDLVM created earlier under 8.7.2, and this works.