{"id":97236,"date":"2017-10-17T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-10-17T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=97236"},"modified":"2019-03-13T01:33:10","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T08:33:10","slug":"20171017-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20171017-00\/?p=97236","title":{"rendered":"When a stopgap solution becomes an undocumented feature some people rely on"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a HREF=\"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20100630-01\/?p=13553#comment-844323\">someone<\/a> wants to know why you cannot run a separate 32-bit instance of Explorer on 64-bit Windows. This used to work in Windows Vista, but stopped working in Windows 7. <\/p>\n<p>The ability to run a 32-bit instance of Explorer on 64-bit Windows was a feature in Windows Vista as a temporary solution in order to get Explorer to show both 64-bit and 32-bit Control Panel icons. In Windows Vista, there was a separate Control Panel inside Control Panel called &#8220;View 32-bit Control Panel Icons&#8221;. This ran a separate copy of 32-bit Explorer so it could load the 32-bit Control Panel icons and let you use them. <\/p>\n<p>However, this was only a temporary solution. <\/p>\n<p>In Windows 7, the work was done to integrate the 32-bit Control Panel icons into the main Control Panel, so you didn&#8217;t have the 32-bit Control Panel icons hanging out in some sort of 32-bit ghetto. In addition to making the Control Panel much prettier, it also made things much easier for users, since they didn&#8217;t have to go digging into two Control Panels to find the icon they wanted. <\/p>\n<p>Once that work was done, a standalone 32-bit copy of Explorer was  no longer needed, and the code to support that configuration could be removed. <\/p>\n<p>If you were <a HREF=\"https:\/\/xkcd.com\/1172\/\">relying on that feature<\/a>, well, you&#8217;re out of luck. But earlier this year, I explained how <a HREF=\"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20170328-00\/?p=95845\">you can work around it<\/a> and get access to your 32-bit shell extensions. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was never meant to be long for this world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-97236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>It was never meant to be long for this world.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}