I know that there are managed shell extensions loaded by explorer.exe on a computer. I want to know what version of the CLR is loaded into explorer.exe. If I am running Vista or Win7, I can use Process Explorer and look at the .NET Assemblies tab of the properties for explorer.exe. However, this doesn't work on XP. Is there a way to get this info on XP?
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Doesn't Process Explorer also show the the DLLs that have been loaded? Look for mscorwks.dll
in that list, and see where it's being loaded from. (That's the workstation version - I can't remember what the server version is, but I don't imagine you'll see it on an XP box anyway. Look for anything beginning with mscor
as a first approximation.)

Jon Skeet
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1Oh, cool. So if I search for "mscorwks" and it lists "explorer.exe" in the results, and under Handle or DLL is shows the path it C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727, then that means definitively that it's using CLR v2.0.50727? – Jack Smith Dec 02 '10 at 16:14
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@Jack Smith: It means that explorer.exe has loaded CLR v2.xxx, yes. Mind you, bear in mind that CLR v4 allowed multiple versions of the CLR to be loaded in the same process... – Jon Skeet Dec 02 '10 at 16:18
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Thanks. If CLR 4 was running and earlier versions were also loaded, would mscorwks.dll be loaded from the v4 location? – Jack Smith Dec 02 '10 at 16:24
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If you have Visual Studio installed on the target computer you can use clrver
<pid>
from a Visual Studio Command Prompt to see what version(s) of the CLR are loaded in a process.
For example:
C:\>clrver 4900
v2.0.50727
This indicates that the process with PID 4900 has .NET 2 loaded.
C:\>clrver -h
Displays CLR versions
Usage: clrver [-?|-all|<PID>]
-all - Displays all processes on the machine using the CLR.
<PID> - Displays the version of the CLR used by the specified process.
-? - Displays this help screen.
If called with no options, clrver will display all installed CLR versions.

Daniel Fortunov
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