I’m seeing this problem too on a brand-spanking-new HP desktop that came with XP SP2. It can’t load libpanda.dll in 1.6.1, but 1.5.4 works fine.
It’s failing on pandac\extension_native_helpers.py, line 73, when it tries to load libpanda.dll
I tried Windows Update, and I tried the VC++ redistributable. No luck.
Any other ideas?