unicows location and registration

[Sweet William]

Hi Guys,

When unicows is installed, should it be placed in windows/system or windows/system32? I got an official M$ installer and it suggested windows/temp!

Also is registration required with regsvr32 /i ?

It seems a lot of people have trouble with the location of this dll and I wondered if not registering it was the problem. In one forum a user put it in system32 and his app was able to find it. Maybe that was a 2k/XP app.

In the install notes for kernelEx 3.? it says that unicows is needed but doesn't say where to put it.

cul8r

[BenoitRen]

WINDOWS\SYSTEM for Win9x. WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 for WinNT.

[Drugwash]

Some applications require it in their main folder. Actually that's the path the application searches for dependencies first of all, then the %system% folder. Some may not even go there and instead return an error if it's not in their folder.

AFAIK, unicows.dll does not need registration since it has no such entry point.

NT-designed applications may be searching for dependencies in System32 if they're badly coded. Some drivers also get installed in a System32 folder (I have a lot of them there in 98SE).

[whatever420]

The only place I could find mentioning UNICOWS.DLL in my registry was...

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\SharedDLLs]

"C:\\WINDOWS\\SYSTEM\\UNICOWS.DLL"=dword:00000001

You may want to add that... apps may look there for it's location...

UNICOWS.reg

[BenoitRen]

Yes, applications look in that registry list first for any DLL. If it finds it there, it will look for it in the given path. Otherwise, it looks in its directory, the desktop, and then the system directory.

[eidenk]

Yes, applications look in that registry list first for any DLL. If it finds it there, it will look for it in the given path.

Are you certain of that ? It does not seem to work like that on my system.

Otherwise, it looks in the desktop

Are you certain of that ? It does not seem to work like that on my system.

AFAIK apps look for dependencies in their own dir as well as in directories that are in the "path". Directories that are in the "path" are the windows dir and the system dir as well as any directory specified in autoexec.bat under the PATH entry.

As for the purpose of the SharedDlls key, there is an explanation here that is completetly different than yours :

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/page-24675_35_0.html

[BenoitRen]

What I'm saying is what I concluded after using RegMon and FileMon.

[eidenk]

Are they right or wrong those conclusions ?

What happens on your system if you move the dependency of an application to the destktop and try to run the app ?

What happens if you move a dependency somewhere, specifiy its path in the shareddlls key and then try to run the app that needs it ?

I did all this on my system and the application refused to start in both cases, saying the dependency was missing.