why does dependency walker shows 32 bit dll as 64 bit?

During some analysis I had this situation on a Windows 7 64-bit machine: I loaded notepad.exe with depends and it shows me dependencies located on System32 as being 64 bit! Is is something buggy in depends or something else开发者_如何学编程 like redirection of dependencies? Any idea on how to interpret the output of depencency walker?

Applications and libraries in the system32 folder under Windows 7 are actually 64bit binaries. The support system for 32 bit stuff is in syswow64. It's like clicking "start" to shutdown your computer :)

WoW64 (Windows 32-bit On Windows 64-bit)

There is no bug. Notepad on Windows 7 is a 64-bit application, and is thus loading 64-bit DLLs from the system32 directory.

The naming conventions on 64-bit Windows operating systems is not exactly intuitive, but I guess it makes sense to somebody.

System32 contains the 64-bit binaries, and SysWOW64 contains the 32-bit binaries.