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VC runtimes are usually part of the important items.
Pretty much : Most stuff compiled by MSVC will want to use the runtimes that are relevant for that release. That means that about 70% of your tools, games and other applications require them. Usually they are silently installed when you install something, however since they are shared and may already exist there's no real notification.
Now, sometimes when people have fiddled with uninstaller scripts, the uninstaller will think it needs to remove the VC runtime which was installed silently by it, or even by something else. This also happens in 'update' installs, where they might no longer be using the 2008 runtimes, but 2010 now... so it removes 2008 from the system. Woops. (Calibre didn't do this, don't worry.)
Now that its removed, other applications that shared it will have problems.
However some bad applications uninstall them accidentally; leaving things that once worked confused as to what happened, since they are bundled with many installers, but shared with many things.
Similar things happen with minor DirectX releases.
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