syswow64 – Make Me Engineer

How to start a 64-bit process from a 32-bit process

November 3, 2022 by Tarik

You can temporarily disable filesystem redirection around the call to Process.Start, the appropriate API’s to P/Invoke are Wow64DisableWow64FsRedirection and Wow64RevertWow64FsRedirection. Another option is to use %windir%\sysnative, which is available on Windows Vista and above.

Why do 64-bit DLLs go to System32 and 32-bit DLLs to SysWoW64 on 64-bit Windows?

May 21, 2022 by Tarik

I believe the intent was to rename System32, but so many applications hard-coded for that path, that it wasn’t feasible to remove it. SysWoW64 wasn’t intended for the dlls of 64-bit systems, it’s actually something like “Windows on Windows64”, meaning the bits you need to run 32bit apps on a 64bit windows. This article explains … Read more