I am going to be removing a lot of old programs but I want to keep these and I don't want to uninstall a Visual C++ Library that was necessary to run one of these....
Libraries are either statically compiled into a program or else are dynamically linked to it. In almost all programs they are dynamically linked via dlls (Dynamic Link Libraries). These runtime components take up so little hard disk space that I would be inclined to just leave them. Some program must have needed them otherwise they wouldn't be installed.