21st February 2001
When you close a door, the door is closed. Makes sense. But when you close a program in Windows 9x, some of its DLLs love to stick around. Some components just never know when to leave, eh? Kick 'em out of memory immediately if you have better things to do with the space. This tweak should benefit those of you who run different programs on a daily basis. Fire up REGEDIT.EXE and navigate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer" -- create a new String Value in the right pane and name it: "AlwaysUnloadDll" (sans quotes). Give this new string a value of 1, close the Registry Editor, and reboot Windows. This will eliminate DLL caching; programs won't re-launch as quickly as before, but it'll bring closure to every close. Perfect for low memory systems or programming environments.