One of the changes in Windows Vista was the removal of the legacy WinHelp viewer winhlp32.exe which was used to display RTF-based online help. It's a help format that dates back to the days of 16-bit Windows, and it hasn't really been updated for quite some time. When Windows 98 was released, Microsoft introduced a new help format called HTML Help which (as the name implies) was based on HTML rather than RTF.

 

For those of us who beta tested Vista and have been working with the RTM build, it's not a surprise that the old WinHelp help files won't display. Instead, you get something like this:

In Knowledge Base article 917607 Microsoft says that a version of the WinHelp viewer will be available in time for the consumer release of Windows Vista scheduled for early 2007. Well, today is that day, and there's nothing in sight.

 

I understand why Microsoft wants to deprecate the old WinHelp format, and I didn't have a problem with it not being available as part of the original RTM build that was made available to developers and volume licensees. However, with the general commercial release of Vista, I think that this creates a unnecessary hardship for users and the software companies that maintain legacy applications. In some cases, creating new help files may not be possible; it also simply may not be feasible to do because of cost. To use the new HTML Help format, you can't simply convert the content from RTF to HTML; changes also need to be made to application so that it uses the HTML Help API. The combination of updating large amounts of help content and making code changes to support the format may simply not make financial sense.

 

If there were technical reasons why WinHelp wouldn't work under Vista, then that would be one thing. However, this is a political decision that they've made, and they're offering no solution to the consumer who is using older software. Their choices are to either live without online help, replace the software, or to simply not upgrade to Vista. What I think Microsoft has missed here is that the path of least resistance is to not upgrade their operating system. As long as Microsoft had committed to releasing a version of WinHelp for Vista, then this would be little more than a minor nuisance. Vista has been released, and yet there's no word as to when (or even if) a version of the WinHelp viewer will be made available. The knowledge base article hasn't been updated in over two months, and questions about this issue on the Microsoft forums go unanswered. Microsoft needs to release a Vista version of the WinHelp viewer, and they need to do it now.