[...] Here is the right way to address this bug:

1. Learn more about manifests, so I know what a good one looks like.
2. Take a look at the one we’re generating for Kiln; see if anything obvious screams out.
3. If so, dive into the build system [blech] and have it fix up the manifest, or generate a better one, or whatever’s involved here. This part’s a second black box to me, since the Kiln Storage Service is just a py2exe executable, meaning that we might be hitting a bug in py2exe, not our build system.
4. If not, burn a Microsoft support ticket so I can learn how to get some more debugging info out of the error message.

Here’s the first thing I actually did:

1. Look at the executable using a dependency checker to see what DLLs it was using, then make sure they were present on Windows 2003.

This is not the behavior of a rational man. [...]

http://bitquabit.com/post/cargo-cult-debugging/