Disadvantages
- In Windows XP, a bug in sxs.dll causes heap corruption, leading to application crashes. This issue is not fixed by any XP service packs. Users must manually install a QFE (Quick Fix Engineering).
- Considerably higher disk space consumption. The winsxs directory typically starts at several gigabytes in size and continues to grow as applications are installed. Further, there is currently no supported way to significantly reduce the size of the winsxs directory.
Read more about this topic: Side-by-side Assembly