activex: when linking against the shared lib DLL, it looks like the linker is picking the DLL name from inside the file, rather than the filename itself. in most cases, this is not a problem, as both are usually the same. Unfortunately, since libtool has a bug on cygwin, whereby the ouput name is libvlc.dll.exe rather than libvlc.dll, the wrong name 'libvlc.dll.exe' is used by the linker rather than the corrected filename. Using the import lib libvlc.dll.a instead fixes that problem. the proper fix should probably a patch to libtool