Mande,
In CVI 8.0 we stopped installing a redist folder, and instead install the CVI merge modules to the common merge modules directory (typically C:\Program Files\Common Files\Merge Modules). This way, if you happen to upgrade a component on your machine that has merge modules (the CVI runtime engine, for example), your built distributions will include the same version of the component that is installed, instead of pulling in some stale modules from the redist folder.
Mert A.
National Instruments