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Asked: 2026-05-11T08:47:44+00:00

I recently got a new laptop. Unfortunately, it came with Vista. It’s been one

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I recently got a new laptop. Unfortunately, it came with Vista. It’s been one big hassle getting it to work, and the comp has hardware components for which there are no XP drivers, so I can’t ‘upgrade’ to an OS that actually works. I’ve mostly gotten things working, but one particularly odd problem has me stumped.

I installed Delphi and tried to build a project. It compiled, but wouldn’t run. ‘This application failed to start because sdl.dll was not found.’ Fair enough. So I grabbed SDL.dll and put it in the C:\windows\system32 folder. (Using Vista 64-bit Home Premium. This is a 32-bit dll, though, so I put it in the 32 folder instead of the 64 one.)

Hit Run again. Same problem. But why? That’s where it goes, right? And C:\windows\system32 is in the system path. Anyone know why it can’t link to the DLL?

(And yes, I know that I can work around the problem by putting the DLL in the same folder as the .exe. I’m currently doing that as a workaround. It’s a bad idea in the long term, though, because I have a handful of different projects that all require SDL.)

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  1. That is not a Vista problem, but a 64 bit Windows problem: The name System32 is really confusing, but this is actually the folder where the systems (64 bit) DLLs reside.

    So on any 64 bit version of Windows…

    … all 64 bit system DLLs are located in C:\Windows\System32.

    … all 32 bit system DLLs are located in C:\Windows\SysWOW64.

    The name comes from Windows on Windows 64 (WOW64) which is the name of the translation layer allowing 32 bit applications to use the native 64 bit system resources.

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