I've installed VS 2017 on Windows 7 machine and built the C++ project targeting 8.1 SDK, but the binaries are not starting on windows 7. The same works on Windows server 2016 and Windows 10 OS.
I had checked VC 2015 runtime is installed on both the windows server and windows 7 machine. And windows 8.1 SDK (as part of VS 2015?) is installed on my local machine running on Windows 7. Previously, I had Visual studio 2015 installed and the binaries used to work fine both on windows 7 and windows server.
I am not sure if the runtime dlls in windows\system32 are corrupted or changed due to VS 2017 installation.
PS: I noticed the same issue of exe not starting when running the newly installed firefox which comes with C-runtime dlls packed.
The problem turned out to be due to the use of the instruction set (AVX2) used by the dependency project, that wasn't available in the windows machine.