Collection of Useful Posts

As we continue our journey through shims provided by the Windows Shim Infrastructure, we have reached a point where I can no longer avoid a discussion of the shims contained in acredir.dll: RedirectFiles and RedirectRegistry. Last time around, I pointed out how to redirect the registry using VirtualRegistry, which requires a command line argument which (for a very long time) was not publicly documented. Instead, a lot of people have been using RedirectRegistry, for two important and logical reasons. First, the name just sounds so tempting, since that's exactly what you likely want to do. Second, the act.chm actually does document these shims. So, I understand why people would rationally flock to these shims. However, one of the internal questions that I address quite a bit: why can't I get xxx application to work with the RedirectFiles shim? Am I putting in the command line wrong? (and the command line follows) So, I'll just say this. You shouldn't use these shims...

The last time around , I suggested that you avoid using the acredir.dll shims - RedirectRegistry and RedirectFiles. As alternatives, I recommended VirtualRegistry and CorrectFilePaths. Of course, I have already gone into some details on how to use VirtualRegistry to achieve that, but I haven't gone in to any details on CorrectFilePaths yet. And, unfortunately, the documentation isn't much help as of the 5.0.1 release (as I said - stay tuned to the documentation for future releases, as this is something we are working on). In fact, here is all that the documentation tells you: "Corrects file paths that changed between Windows 95 or Windows 98 and Windows XP Professional. This compatibility fix works by converting the file paths to the correct location for Windows XP Professional in the APIs. For example, a Windows 95 path of C:\Windows\Write.exe is converted to C:\Windows\System32\Write.exe." While this is true, it is not comprehensive (and is, theref...