Raymond Chen published a blog post about how a crappy uninstaller on Windows caused a mysterious spike in the number of Explorer (Windows’ graphical shell) crashes. It turns out the buggy uninstaller caused repeated crashes in the 32bit version of Explorer on 64bit systems, and – hold on a minute. The how many bits on the what now?
The 32-bit version of Explorer exists for backward compatibility with 32-bit programs. This is not the copy of Explorer that is handling your taskbar or desktop or File Explorer windows. So if the 32-bit Explorer is running on a 64-bit system, it’s because some other program is using it to do some dirty work.
↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing
So I had no idea that 64bit Windows included a copy of the 32bit Explorer for backwards compatibility. It obviously makes sense, but I just never stopped to think about it. This made me wonder though if you could go nuts and do something really dumb: could you somehow trick 64bit Windows into running this 32bit copy of Explorer as its shell? You’d be running 32bit Explorer on 64bit Windows using the 32bit WoW64 binaries where you just pulled the 32bit Explorer binary from, which seems like a really nonsensical thing to do.
Since there’s no longer any 32bit builds of Windows 11, you also can’t just copy over the 32bit Explorer from a 32bit Windows 11 build and achieve the same goal that way, so you’d really have to go digging around in WoW64 to get 32bit versions. I guess the answer to this question depends on just how complete this copy of 32bit Explorer really is, and if Windows has any defenses or triggers in place to prevent someone from doing something this uselessly stupid. Of course, there’s no practical reason to do any of this and it makes very little sense, but it might be a fun hacking project.
Most likely the Windows experts among you are wondering what kind of utterly deranged new designer drug I’m on, but I was always told that sometimes, the dumbest questions can lead to the most interesting answers, so here we are.
For all the hate Microsoft gets, can we stop and appreciate how flawlessly 32-bit applications run in 64-bit Windows? The only problems are with apps that try to install 32-bit drivers (which obviously fails), such as games that come with StarForce DRM, but otherwise it’s been smooth sailing for me.
Tricks like the one mentioned in the article are the invisible things Microsoft did so you don’t even notice when your 64-bit Windows runs a 32-bit app.
Wish they did the same for win16 apps.
kurkosdr,
Well, they made some particularly bad technical decisions and introduced totally unnecessary complexity and bugs that were very confusing for users. For example software would complain about missing DLLs despite the fact that the files were present exactly where the error messages said they were missing from. Because of those design faults, I won’t give microsoft high marks on it’s handling of the 64bit transition.
Other operating systems handled the transition cleaner without the hacks that would plague windows. Still though, I do agree it’s nice to be able to keep running older software.
For better or worse, AMD decided to drop 16bit from 64bit. The CPU still physically supports 16bit modes but AMD designed x86_64 to disable them from long mode. Obviously Intel were focused on IA-64 (itanium) at the time and didn’t weigh in on x86_64’s design, but it would have been out of character for intel to break backwards compatibility like AMD did. I suspect that if intel’s engineers had designed x86_64 instead of AMD, 16bit mode might still be supported.
Haven’t seen software complain about missing DLLs, must be some really crappy software.
Also, win16 doesn’t run in real-mode (or Virtual8086) in 32-bit Windows, and Wine also supports win16 without using Virtual8086. So, win16 could have been done on 64-bit Windows too.
DOS 16-bit indeed can’t be done on 64-bit Windows without virtualization or emulation of some kind (in fact, Microsoft kind of offered that thing with “XP mode” in Windows 7, since you could spin up a virtualized pre-activated copy of Windows XP 32-bit and run your DOS software there).
Sorry this is off topic, but slightly related. Under MacOSX If I changed the OS9 finder’s type code to APPL, I could launch the OS9 finder like an App under OSX (using classic). It mostly worked. spring-loaded folders and all at a time when OSX finder was not as fully featured. I would also quit the OSX finder so that the os9 desktop icons would not be covered by the OSX icons.