Windows Help - End of Support

End of Support

At the 2006 WritersUA conference, Microsoft announced its intentions to phase out WinHelp as a supported platform. Ted Dworkin (Partner Director of WinHelp Experience) stated, "WinHelp does not meet the code standards established for Vista. These standards include security, reliability, and performance." He went on to say that WinHelp is designed in such a way that, "...we would have to rewrite it from the ground up to meet the Vista code standards. And that approach doesn't make sense given that we have two other Help systems in Vista."

The updated licensing agreement prohibits application developers from packaging the WinHelp libraries with their installers. This means that WinHelp manuals for legacy applications are not readable on a new Windows Vista installation. To read them, the end-user must obtain the 32-bit WinHelp viewer from Microsoft's website and manually install it (which requires WGA validation and an account with administrative rights).