> I've never been adventurous enough to see what happens when you kill the
process.
Usually no harm done except to running Win 16 apps.
> I can't figure out what would be running inside of it though, there
shouldn't be any reason for it to be running unless NT requires some very
old code to run.
In early NT (3.1 ish) it used to run on demand (when a 16 bit app started)
but since there weren't many 32 bit apps MS changed things so that it
started by default (3.5 ish) to reduce 16 bit app startup time. I think that
the current (4.0 ish) behaviour is that it loads on demand for the first 16
bit app but then hangs around in case you start another.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Helen Borrie [mailto:helebor@...]
> Does anyone else have a process named ' wowexec.exe' (the first character
> is a blank, or maybe 2 blank chars) in their list of processes on NT4 SP5?
The spaces are more of an indent to indicate that wowexec.exe runs under the
NTVDM.EXE (NT Virtual Doc Machine). The NTVDM is the compatability layer and
wowexec.exe is the 16bit pieces of old Win3.1 that facilitate 16 bit
programs running happily. If you start another 16 bit app (e.g. MS Access 2)
then you will see another process called " msaccess.exe" under there. If
you chose to run the 16 bit app in a seperate memory space then you get a
whole new NTVDM also. This can be used to protect buggy 16 bit apps from
each other the way 32 bit apps are but uses more resources.