Making TUGZip Shell Extensions Work In Vista x86_64

For those of you that don’t know what TUGZip is, it’s a free archiving utility (think WinZip) developed by Christian Kindahl which is also the developer of my favorite burning software InfraRecorder. And honestly, the only reason why I found out about TUGZip is because of it’s link in the InfraRecorder website. If it wasn’t there I would have never, ever…found out about TUGZip. I’d be stuck using 7-Zip forever, never knowing that a aesthetically pleasing application like TUGZip existed. I mean 7-Zip works fine for me, it’s just that it doesn’t really look 2.0′ish to me if you get my drift. Now, people that use TUGZip in a x86_64 system specifically Vista know that TUGZip’s 32-bit shell extensions do not work in x86_64 versions of Vista, meaning that when you right-click in Windows Explorer, nothing shows up.  Now that can be quite annoying if you want to archive something when you’re in Windows Explorer, that means you have to open TUGZip and then do it from there.

I’ve only been using TUGZip for a couple of months and I was trying to look for a solution in their forums and it looks like this problem with a 64-bit operating system has been going on for years. This same problem was also the reason why I was both running 7-Zip and TUGZip together because 7-Zip has a 64-bit version and its shell extension works perfectly fine with Vista 64-bit. There were tons of people that were trying to edit their Registry in order for TUGZip’s 32-bit shell extensions to work in a 64-bit operating system. None of the solutions work as far as I’m concerned since on the last page of that thread, I can still see people asking how to make it work.

So my question is, if there’s still no 64-bit shell extension for TUGZip what will happen if we do the opposite? Instead of TUGZip needing to have 64-bit shell extensions to work why not use a 32-bit application of Windows Explorer so the 32-bit shell extensions of TUGZip works. That’s exactly what I did and my god it worked…perfectly!

To start Windows Explorer in 32-bit mode, we need to create a shortcut. The 32-bit version of Windows explorer resides in C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ so just change your drive letter if it’s not C. So that’s where our shortcut will point to.

Now you can’t just make a shortcut and just put C:\Windows\SysWOW64\explorer.exe you need to add the /separate switch so that that specific process of Windows Explorer is well…separate from the 64-bit version of Windows Explorer. The /separate switch also allows you to use different credentials if you want.

So what’s the final thing that you put in Target?

C:\Windows\SysWOW64\explorer.exe /separate

This is what it’s supposed to look like. Please note that I’ve put extra comments on the shortcut properties to make it look like it was there by default. I’ve also named it Windows Explorer (32-bit) and I’ve put it in my Accessories program groups.

When you’re done, hit Apply or Ok and test your newly made shortcut out. Here’s what mine look like!

Pretty ain’t it? I hope that helps!