Some random technical pieces from my own meanderings through the scape that is Microsoft's Windows system...
With any luck, there might be something here that could save someone some time and grief ;)
A must have tool is PEBrowse Pro by SmidgeonSoft written by the great Russell Osterlund. Use it to disassemble Win32/Win64 and .NET (assemblies) PE binaries (EXE/DLL).
I have been using this great tool as a lightweight disassembler for a decade. It is updated fairly often improving features. It's really nice tool to use to see a Win32 binary's imports and exports. Much nicer than using DUMPBIN, unless you prefer a command line app. They also have a debugger as well that works on Win32 apps and .NET apps.