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ONE OF THE BIGGEST headaches for users of Windows 95 - especially corporations with hundreds or thousands of PCs - is the fact that installing one Windows application can write over "shared" files used by other applications.
This causes the more unfortunate applications,which previously worked fine, to crash when they can't find the file they expected.
This problem affects several types of files, including dynamic link libraries, or DLLs, and is therefore referred to as "DLL hell."
I wrote a series of four columns documenting this problem back in September 1996. (To read these columns, go to http:// www.infoworld.com/printlinks.) This series showed that a high percentage of Windows 95 crashes could be attributed to DLL conflicts. A conflict occurs when an older DLL has been written over a newer one, but the change is not enough to make Windows totally unusable. Only when an application tries to run a specific function in an affected library - and the function doesn't work in the older version - do you experience a crash. Hitting that...