It kind of does say that although I grant you not directly. It says that you should call InitCommonControls to ensure that the dll is loaded. In a sense it implies that loading the dll is the end goal, so once that goal is achieved then your job is done. That is all is says, it gives no other reason for the function to exist.

Not the best wording if that's from some old PlatformSDK version... here's what the most recent version says:



I guess that initialization is in reality done on process or thread attach to the DLL - but it could just as well have been done by the InitCommonControls call.

I'm nazi about this, yes, but I fucking hate when badly coded software breaks on a newer system, and the amount of backwards-compatibility shit Microsoft has to keep lugging around because of it.