It's a great idea and still is. Linux does pretty much the same thing. It actually broke because they didn't allow multiple versions and windows linked to the

It's a great idea and still is. Linux does pretty much the same thing. It actually broke because they didn't allow multiple versions and windows linked to the latest version at runtime. They fixed all this with WinSXS which allows a PE file to specify a manifest i.e. a list of required versions of DLLs to load. This is all neatly explained here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa376307.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa376307.aspx