Miles/Mss DLL error (HL2 mods) Thread

I had never noticed any sort of problem with Half Life 2, but after attempting to play Riot Act I ran into an error where it reported something along the lines of "The mss DLL file is installed in the Windows or Windows System directory - it must be installed in the application directory". I figured I would run Halflife 2 and see if the problem presented there, and it did, which seemed odd because I had a friend run through it last year no problems, although I've installed episode 2 and some hardware, something must have affected it. At any rate, I was able to find via Google the way to get around that problem in HL2 itself, I just copied the mss32.dll file from the Halflife 2 bin directory to the Halflife 2 directory and that worked for whatever reason.

However, when I copied mss32.dll into the directory for Riot Act, and it's bin directory to be safe, it didn't correct the error message. After that I downloaded and installed Awakening, and the same thing happened, and the solution that worked for the HL2 didn't work for it either. I hadn't ever heard of Miles Sound System but it's apparently widely used and this problem is not limited to Halflife 2 or it's mods. From the searching I have done I have been unable to find any sort of solution, however if this problem persists it seems like I may be unable to play any Halflife 2 mods, which would be quite disappointing.

If anyone knows of a solution to this problem I would be very interested to hear it, as I am running out of relevant issues to look through on Google, and a search of this site also failed to turn up any references to mss or miles, and the only two dll issues I've seen were not related to this problem. The game fires up and plays the valve logo sound, but when it goes to load the menu screen it dumps me to a solid black screen, from there I can alt tab to see the Miles error, hitting escape at the black screen brings me out without seeing that error, I just see an error that reads 'The instruction at "0x101f3e2c" referenced memory at "0x0e3ca1a0". The memory could not be "read"'

Okay, update, I decided before I went to bed I would try copying the file into the source sdk base directory, and it loaded up a little farther, I could see the menu screen, but then it gave another error, this one pertaining to "datacache.dll" and without any apparently useful data. I'm still hoping this is a problem someone may be able to help me with.

***Additional update***
After repeated attempts to determine what was going on with Awakening to no avail, I decided to download Riot Act again and try it. It seems that copying the mss32.dll into the Source SDK Base directory successfully repaired Riot Act, and my problems with Awakening are now a confined issue. Hopefully anyone else out there in the future attempting to play Half Life 2 mods, that runs into the MSS DLL error will be able to find this thread and resolve the issue as I have, by copying mss32.dll from the halflife2/bin directory into the source sdk base directory.

Strangely enough I had to do this for Halflife 2, Episode 1, and Lost Coast, but Episode 2 was unaffected by that particular problem. However I did have an issue with Halflife 2 Episode 2 that corrected when I deleted the orange box sdk base and the regular sdk base, and then didn't come back when I downloaded them again. Unfortunately Awakening is still giving me the datacache error, so apparently it wasn't meant to be.

Thanks to anyone who read this thread and wanted to help. Hopefully someone in the future may be aided by my own experience with this MSS DLL error debacle.

Edited by: Clawdius