I’ve been checking the microsoft specs on the VC++ redistribution. Seems that alle the required files are there, so this cannot be the problem. However, I did found many differences in the manifest files of version 1.5.4 and 1.6.0.
My guess now is that somehow the behaviour of the manifest parsing is different on XP SP2 (the laptop where it failes to run) and XP SP3 (the desktop that runs OK).