My colleague and I ran into a problem today where an old ASP site had problems creating old VB6 components. So as not to forget what to do;

In Win64 the registry is conceptually broken into two versions, one for 64 and one for 32 (or Wow). So when you register a 32bit COM component then it lives under HK_CLASSES_ROOT\Wow6432Node rather than just HK_CLASSES_ROOT. This is important because when we were profiled the registry access would could see that the call to create the object was failing because it couldn’t locate the prog id in CLASSES_ROOT. The reason it was looking there was the web site was running as a 64bit process and therefore was looking in the Wow section. The answer to the problem was hidden away in the Advanced Settings of site’s Application Pool in IIS. By turning on ‘Enable 32bit applications’ the OS was able to redirect the registry requests to the correct location and the object was successfully created.

I thought I’d show what happens when you’re attacked by a fake anti-virus scam…

It starts off by popping up a message (note it says from webpage and not the OS)

Then it looks like Windows Explorer but it’s really still just the browser. Also this is running Win7 and not XP as the fake page tries to look like

Looks realistic though doesn’t? You can see why people have fallen for it. And now for the money…

Yeah I think I’ll say no to that don’t you, thanks for asking.

So be careful out there.

This confused me for a bit, they’ve moved the Network DTC Access dialog from the MSDTC tab to it’s own node…

Select properties on the above node…