Why does installing VS 2017 fix the Assembly is still being loaded error?

We have a scenario where an application is deployed on a server which makes calls into another component DLL. On certain servers we were noticing an exception being thrown which caused the functionality to not work:

Assembly is still being loaded

The only difference we could identify on the servers where the error didn't occur was on the ones with VS installed. After deploying Visual Studio 2017 on the server that was throwing the exception we were able to confirm that it fixed the problem.

Does anyone have any insight as to what might be happening here? Or even how to go about troubleshooting/diagnosing it? The server has .NET 4.6.2 deployed.

The full error is:

An unexpected error has occurred. System.IO.FileLoadException: Assembly is still being loaded. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131016)