Let  be a completely regular Hausdorff space,  a real normed space, and let  be the space of all bounded continuous -valued functions on . We develop the general duality theory of the space  endowed with locally solid topologies; in particular with the strict topologies  for . As an application, we consider criteria for relative weak-star compactness in the spaces of vector measures  for . It is shown that if a subset  of  is relatively -compact, then the set  is still relatively -compact...