why does dependency walker shows 32 bit dll as 64 bit?

Question

During some analysis I had this situation on a Windows 7 64-bit machine: I loaded notepad.exe with depends and it shows me dependencies located on System32 as being 64 bit! Is is something buggy in depends or something else like redirection of dependencies? Any idea on how to interpret the output of depencency walker?

Answer 1

Applications and libraries in the system32 folder under Windows 7 are actually 64bit binaries. The support system for 32 bit stuff is in syswow64. It's like clicking "start" to shutdown your computer :)

WoW64 (Windows 32-bit On Windows 64-bit)

Answer 2

There is no bug. Notepad on Windows 7 is a 64-bit application, and is thus loading 64-bit DLLs from the system32 directory.

The naming conventions on 64-bit Windows operating systems is not exactly intuitive, but I guess it makes sense to somebody.

System32 contains the 64-bit binaries, and SysWOW64 contains the 32-bit binaries.