Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Why are 32-bit shortcuts needed on 64-bit systems?

A 64-bit system normally contains shortcuts to 64-bit versions of operating system applications, such as cmd.exe, odbcad32.exe, wscript.exe, cscript.exe, etc. Creating shortcuts to 32-bit versions of these same applications may be necessary in order to access objects, such as 32-bit ODBC drivers.

As an example, running the 64-bit version of odbcad32.exe (located in system32) will show 64-bit version ODBC drivers, but not 32-bit. Running the 32-bit version of odbcad32.exe (located in syswow64) will show 32-bit version ODBC drivers, but not 64-bit.

Running a script, such as VBScript that utilizes 32-bit ODBC drivers, from a 64-bit version of cmd.exe (located in system32) may fail because of it inability to access 32-bit ODBC drivers. The same script will run successfully using the 32-bit version of cmd.exe.

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