The different versions of comctl32 are part of Microsoft's "assembly" system which is primarilly an attempt to battle "DLL hell" as well as part of their .NET strategy, which (correct me if I'm wrong) I don't think afflicts this part of WINE very much.
Altho one thing to consider in this area is Manifests, which at a minimal case could be used to simply enable/disable theme support for a particular application, or could be ignored completely for themes (similar to how applications like Stardock's WindowBlinds skins every app, regardless of a Manifest requesting the new comctl32).
On Tuesday 30 September 2003 10:57 am, Roderick Colenbrander wrote:
Ofcourse I want uxtheme.dll implemented since it is a very cool new dll but I think a problem will be that it needs changes in various parts of Wine. Mainly in the user and common control area. Microsoft releases two sets of comctl32 dlls. One of them is meant for backwards compatibility. Because of this I think Wine will need two dlls and it might be needed to maintain two dlls. :(
Because of all this I said that it might be something for after Wine 1.0. This dll could later be reused for theming Wine and that atleast was something we planned to do behind 1.0, right?
Roderick