I wrote this a year or two ago and have forgotten the details, but there was definitely some reason why you couldn't "just statically link" it, otherwise that's exactly what I would have done, and saved myself some hassle.

IIRC it was either because there wasn't support for it back then, or the static version didn't support older Windows versions, or somesuch Microsoft nonsense.

But for whatever reason it was, they strongly push people to use the DLL, and deploying DLLs in installers is a PITA, so...