Windows – Process Monitor fails to start on a 64 bit computer

64-bitmonitoringwindowswindows 7

When I try to start Process Monitor from SysInternals on some 64 bit windows 7 machines,the process fails to start. There is no error message. I double click and nothing happens. Other 64 bit windows 7 computers work fine. Any ideas?

Best Answer

Here is what I found. The 32 bit Procmon.exe contains the 64 bit exe inside it as a binary resource. When the 32 bit exe starts, it extracts the 64 bit version out to a hidden file called Procmon64.exe and then executes that. For some reason this process fails on some Windows 7 installs.

I managed to extract the 64 bit exe using Visual Studio 2010.

  1. Open Visual Studio and open the Procmon.exe file using the File->Open->File... menu
  2. In the resource tree, expand the "BINRES" node
  3. Right-click on the 1308 node and select Export...
  4. Name the exported resource Procmon-64.exe and save
  5. Run the extracted exe

Don't name the extracted exe Procmon64.exe (no hyphen) because the 32 bit Procmon will try to delete it if it gets the chance.

If you don't have Visual Studio, use a windows executable resource extractor like ResourcesExtract - http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/resources_extract.html

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