any other supported Win32 system link library, the linker will resolve referenced symbols with the ones provided by instead. When a wide-character function is called for the first time at runtime, the function stub in first receives control and checks if it is running on a Windows 95/98/Me system: If so, it dynamically loads (if it hasn't been loaded yet) and passes control to the corresponding thunking stub in there. The thunking stub translates the wide-character arguments into ANSI strings and then invokes the native version from the OS, and translates any returned strings back into wide character format. If the OS natively supports the version (i.e. the Windows NT line of operating systems), then the function stub updates the in-memory symbol table so that future calls will directly invoke the native version without any more overhead. Because of this technique, when an application is linked against MSLU, only Windows 95/98/Me systems will need to rely on at runtime, and on all other versions of Windows there is only a slight performance penalty the first time a function is called. A common problem encountered occurs when some update packages or uninstall programs rename or delete either of the OLE libraries (, ), which are dependencies of . This results in some applications, such as OpenOffice.org, showing an error with the message "Application cannot start because one of the required libraries cannot be found." This occurs even if is installed in the system, as it cannot start without its dependencies (see also DLL hell). References External links Microsoft Official announcement of availability MSDN Magazine article describing MSLU MSDN programming reference pages Michael Kaplan's blog entries about MSLU internals Download of MSLU redistributable (UNICOWS.DLL) Known bugs in each released MSLU version — formerly maintained by Michael Scott Kaplan, an employee of Microsoft who was the principal developer and maintainer for MSLU. Open source alternatives libunicows — provides an MIT-licensed version of only the UNICOWS.LIB link-library, but still requires the Microsoft-provided or Mozilla's . opencow (previously MZLU) — reimplements both the DLL and LIB link-library as MPL 1.1/GPL 2.0/LGPL 2.1, originally for and by Mozilla. Layer for Unicode Unicode