Some time ago, I described the purpose of the icons in the moricons.dll and progman.exe icon libraries, along with a list of which programs Windows automatically associated the icons with. (moricons.dll, progman.exe).

One common problem is that multiple programs share the same executable name, so if you find an executable named MAIL.EXE, you aren’t sure whether that’s PATHWORKS Mail or cc:Mail or XcelleNet X/Mail.

What did Windows 3.1 do when it saw these ambiguous files?

It simply asked the user for help.

Setup ApplicationsSetup needs to know the application name for:C:\MAIL\MAIL.EXESelect the application name from the following list, and choose OK, or press ENTER to continue.Microsoft MailPATHWORKS Mail for MS-DOScc:Mail for MS-DOSXcelleNet X/Mail for MS-DOSNone of the aboveOKCancelHelp

The information for this came from the APPS.INF file, the format of which is documented in the Windows Resource Kit. (It starts on page 121.)

Next time, we’ll see how Windows 95 improved on this in its application compatibility database.

The post How did Windows 3.1 distinguish two different programs that happened to share the same executable name? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

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