Where to install shared DLLs on Windows

Posted by BruceCran on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by BruceCran
Published on 2010-04-20T18:55:52Z Indexed on 2010/04/20 19:13 UTC
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Windows

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dll

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deployment

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install

I have a driver which can be installed on Windows (XP/Vista/7). It's accessed via a DLL that applications link to, and which is also a Winsock Provider (WSP). It used to be installed under System32, but having seen advice not to, I changed it to install under ProgramFiles instead.

Now, the problem is that people are having to either copy it back into System32 or copy it into the application directory whenever they want to use it in their own applications, because Windows won't search the install directory under ProgramFiles when the application tries to load the DLL.

I've been unable to find any Microsoft documentation discussing this issue, so if System32 shouldn't be used then where should shared DLLs be installed?

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