The short answer: "The 32 is just part of the name and doesn’t mean anything." -- Raymond Chen The long answer: "There are quite a number of existing 32-bit

The short answer: "The 32 is just part of the name and doesn’t mean anything." -- Raymond Chen The long answer: "There are quite a number of existing 32-bit programs that hard-code the System32 path rather than calling the GetSystemDirectory function. When these programs are recompiled for 64-bit Windows, they will still try to access the System32 directory, expecting to find 64-bit files (because the program is now compiled 64-bit). Paths written into configuration files or the registry need to be meaningful to both 32-bit and 64-bit processes, yet need to refer to the appropriate directory depending on the “bitness” of the program doing the asking." https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-magazine/ff955767(v=msdn.10) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-m... Basically System32 is the system directory regardless of the bitness of the OS. What matters is the bitness of the program being executed. If a 32bit program accesses System32 on a 64bit machine, it's silently redirected to a folder containing 32bit libraries.