>> It could imagine that it would be better to modify the EXE loader in >> Windows (and DLLs are EXE to Windows AFAIR) to copy the executable to >> a special location hidden to applications and users first and execute >> it from there. >> Sure, we would lose a lot of performance doing it that way, but OTOH >> this would make Windows behave like I expect it from experience with >> usual OSes like SunOS or Linux. And, we will not run into problems >> after an update, like it has to expected when a new EXE requires a >> changed data or config file format which isn't compatible to the old >> version.
I'm just a lurker on that list and I haven't got much to contribute but I think it may be interesting for you to know that this is how the .NET Platform proceeds to allow live replacement of DLL. Not all loaded are systematically copied into a temporary directory but an application wanting to dynamically replace its modules may specify it to the class loader and bla bla bla so on... Microsoft working around the problems they themselves created.
