Does LoadLibrary parse environment variables such as %windir%

Question

If I do LoadLibrary("%windir%\\\\system32\\\\ole32.dll") does that mean Windows will ONLY load from "c:\\windows\\system32\\ole32.dll" ? Also does LoadLibrary() in C understand the environment variable?

Answer 1

as Serge said and carefully tested, LoadLibrary does not do environment variable substitution in path.

however, there is a function in the windows API to replace environment variables in strings: ExpandEnvironmentStrings() . you can perform the required substitution on your path before calling LoadLibrary() .

Answer 2

The docs for LoadLibrary clearly state that:

If the string specifies a full path, the function searches only that path for the module.

That said, they don't mention support for environment variables substitution. I seriously doubt they do support environment variables substitution: That's a shell feature, not a kernel API one.

BTW, that means LoadLibrary() would consider %windir%\\blah.dll as a relative path since it doesn't start with a drive letter or a UNC path. Hence it would look through the whole series of directories, looking for a subdir named %windir% , which it's not likely to find!

I gave it a quick test: It confirms my opinion. Error = 126 : The specified module could not be found .