What's RunDll32ShimW for in mscoree.dll?

I was looking at the exports in mscoree and notice that it exports a function named RunDll32ShimW. The docs on MSDN here aren't particularly helpful. Anyone know what this was for?

I checked out the disassembly of it (it's not in the SSCLI) and it looks like it takes an assembly name and function, loads the DLL with 开发者_如何学运维mscoree!LoadLibraryShim, and calls the function on it.

The key sentence from the documentation is this:

This function has been deprecated in the .NET Framework version 4.

As to what it does, I would make an educated guess that it calls ShellExecute or CreateProcess and was meant to be invoked by rundll32.exe.