Help with forwarding .spec and DLL overrides for a new DLL

[Shachar Shemesh]

Hi list,

I'm having trouble with my unicows.dll implementation. I can trace this 
problem down to forwarding entries not working, but I can't understand why.

I am attaching the diffs for my current unicows patch (not working 
though it is). I'm trying to run it with a program I wrote. This program 
is the plain "Hello world" Visual Studio 6 produces when you ask for a 
Win32 application, with two changes. I changed the link order according 
to the instructions for using MSLU 
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/10/MSLU/default.aspx), so 
that the app will use unicows.dll on win98. The second is that I 
modified the LoadString and DrawText to specifically call LoadStringW 
and DrawTextW. The application is, otherwise, an ANSI application (only 
two Unicode functions called).

The resulting app works ok on Windows 2000 and on Windows 98 (the later 
only when unicows.dll is in the same directory as the application - as 
it should). When trying to run the app on Wine with os=nt4, or with 
os=win98 and the native unicows.dll in the same directory as the app, 
everything works. So far, so good.

Now comes the part things stop to work. First - I couldn't get my DLL 
overrides to take effect. I tried adding "UNICOWS.DLL"=b, but it 
wouldn't load my winelib dll over the standard one. I eventually created 
a symbolic link from a file called "unicows.dll" in the apps' dir to my 
unicows.dll.so file. That caused my dll to load.

The second had to do with the forwarding call. I generated (using a 
small perl script) the spec file for the DLL. It forwards all Unicode 
calls to the relevant Unicode call. Strangely, when the entries for 
LoadStringW and DrawTextW were pointing to the corresponding calls in 
user32, the program wouldn't run correctly. When I replaced them with 
explicit loading of user32.dll and GetProcAddress, everything works 
(that's the way it's currently in the diff). This suggests, to me, that 
the spec file is incorrectly set up. Can anyone please point me to my 
mistake?

Shachar