Yep, and for the sake of making sure everyone can appreciate the joke I suppose I should explain the other half. During the 32 -> 64 bit transition, Windows too

Yep, and for the sake of making sure everyone can appreciate the joke I suppose I should explain the other half. During the 32 -> 64 bit transition, Windows took the opposite approach: instead of packing both architectures into a single "fat" library file, they would separate them into different folders. 64 bit libraries would be "native" and go into the usual system library folder and legacy 32 bit versions would go into a new "Windows on Windows" emulation folder. Good so far. The problem is that the usual system library folder was /Windows/System32 which alludes to 32-bit-ness but will now hold 64 bit libraries. That's a bit facepalm, but sacrifices had to be made for compatibility, or something (I would assume). For the emulation folder they chose /Windows/SysWOW64 because "Windows on Windows" ran on 64 bit and emulated 32 bit. Fair enough, I suppose, but now a folder with a name alluding to 64-bit-ness will contain 32 bit libraries, so we have a double facepalm: C:\Windows\System32 is where the 64 bit libraries live C:\Windows\SysWOW64 is where the 32 bit libraries live This is silly enough that it deserves a good-natured elbow-jab every now and then.