The ordinal 242 could not be located in the dynamic link library Anaconda3\Library\bin\mkl_intel_thread.dll

Question

I have just installed Anaconda 5.3 64-bit (Anaconda3-5.3.0-Windows-x86_64) on Windows 10 and am getting this error when trying to run Spyder.

pythonw.exe

Answer 1

If you are running Python/IPython from a console, check the priority of libiomp5md.dll using where, i.e.:

where libiomp5md.dll

This may show a few absolute paths (one per line) to different libiomp5md.dll files. A healthy setup should list Anaconda's at the top (e.g. C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\Library\bin\libiomp5md.dll), and if there are any others listed below, they can be ignored as they have lower priority.

However, if you see a different libiomp5md.dll path at the top, then this will be loaded first, and may conflict with Anaconda's DLLs. If this file is in the current directory, then either change directory to a folder without this file, or (if possible) delete or rename the conflicting DLL file. If it's in a different folder, then you may need to re-arrange your PATH variable to move Anaconda's before other paths.

Answer 2

I had the same problem and after trying many solutions, including the above, I finally managed to solve it.

First, open command prompt(Administrator) and input:

set CONDA_DLL_SEARCH_MODIFICATION_ENABLE=1

Then, launch the Spyder IDE, always using the command prompt by simply inputting:

spyder

It is important to always launch spyder with the command prompt. If you launch Spyder with the Anaconda Navigator, it will still give you the error message.