About Manifest file

Question

Recently, I encountered a very strange issue, this issue only happens in Windows XP SP3 and Vista. Here are my steps:

1. Create two new folders in desktop (assume fol

Answer 1

[I'm the current SxS maintainer at Microsoft]

Good investigation Yigang. You're describing the behavior on Vista, not on XP SP3.

Probing for the existence of a manifest every time an app is run would be a performance issue, since usually apps either have a manifest or don't, and that state doesn't change much. For this reason, on Vista, the first time an application is run, we cache a bit describing "this application has an associated manifest" or "this application does not have a manifest". When you ran graphedt.exe the first time, Windows cached the absence of a manifest, and will subsequently not look for one. To reset the cache, update the last modified time on the executable.