A Timeless Question Answered

Throughout the course of Windows history, one process has always stood out to me the most. It runs silently in your task manager, calmly taking up memory with little explanation as to what it does. Of course, I'm speaking of rundll32.exe. In fact, you may have seen it crop up a time or two when a program crashes, but other than that, it's just something that is “there”.

So what is it, exactly?

Well, Rundll32 is actually a medium for which other DLL files go through. Think of it like a baseball pitching machine, and the DLL files are the baseballs. Since there is no way to directly launch a DLL file by itself, Windows needs an application to do this. That's where rundll32.exe comes in. It launches functionality stored within 32 bit DLL files, thus the name, “run dll 32”.

Be warned, however, as malicious programs like spyware can run under the same name! Keep your virus scanning software up to date, and run weekly spyware checks! That way, you'll ensure that the process you've just learned about is the one with good intentions!

DLL (Dynamic Link Library) files are basically "support" files for certain types of software. They are generally (but not always) found in your Windows System directory.

They work like this: Let's say a program needs to perform an operation. Rather than all the coding being built into the program, it uses a particular DLL file that, with a simple call, can perform the operation for it. Saves lots of programming time, especially since many of the common DLL files are already installed with Windows.