Re: win32Lib Apps Crashing on Startup
- Posted by petelomax Dec 29, 2011
- 2793 views
Microsoft has actually gone to considerable lengths to ensure that applications that do this will continue to work. They have taken considerable criticism over this.
While this is not really relevant to anything said so far in this thread, M$ certainly deserve all the criticism they get, and more, for HKLM\Software\WOW6432Node.
In case you don't know, if you read/write hklm/software/xxx using a 32-bit app on 64-bit windows, it redirects it to hklm/software/wow6432node/xxx, quite why completely escapes me, and thus if you replace a 32-bit app with its 64-bit version, it loses all its settings. What they don't do is redirect hklm/software/microsoft to hklm/software/wow6432node/microsoft, presumably because they realised that would make their life difficult.
There are also a whole bunch of file system redirects, C:\Documents and Settings is now C:\Users, C:\windows\system32 now holds 64-bit dlls and c:\windows\syswow64 holds 32-bit dlls, loads of fun for the unwary. For a full list see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb756982.aspx. All I am saying is please don't stand there and say m$ did a good job when what they really did was dream up every trick possible to push developers onto 64-bit .NET (which presumably don't cope with spaces in pathnames too well 
)
Another great howler was ODBC: you set up some DSN's, they don't work. Why? Because the ODBC manager visible on the menu is the 64-bit version, you have to hunt in C:\Windows for the 32-bit exe and run that instead.
Pete
