What RUNDLL does is this... suppose you are going to make alfredo for dinner, but you want your hubby to cook the pasta for you. You can't tell him to look at the "cook pasta" card and do that, because the "cook pasta" card isn't designed to be a "recipe card"...lets say that to cook a meal, hubby goes to the recipe box and pulls out a recipe card, puts it on a little holder-stand, and follows the directions. If the recipe card says "pull out the "cook pasta dll" card and do that, he pulls the "cook pasta" card out, puts it on the stand to read it, and then goes back to the recipe card to follow up with the directions.

Now, you have told hubby that he is NOT allowed to take one of the DLL cards out of the box by itself and "do it" , he can only pull a dll card out when another recipe card tells him to do so. This is because you don't want him eating naked pasta by accident the next time you go on vacation, so you have distinguished the "Recipe" cards from the "DLL" cards, marked them blue or something.

But now you want him to do just that because you want his help in preparing dinner. The RUNDLL program allows him to get the DLL card, that normally isn't supposed to be "complete" on its own, and do just that. The RUNDLL card is just a blank recipe card, marked in blue like the others, with an empty line at the bottom... you take a magic marker and write in "cook pasta.dll" on the blank line and give him the card. He can do that now because the RUNDLL is marked as a Recipe card and he is allowed to do what a recipe card says. Otherwise you'd have to send him vaccuuming the living room instead to keep him out of your hair while you are trying to cook.

RUNDLL32.exe isn't a functional program by itself, that is it doesn't do anything on its own. Remember when you saw it listed as RUNDLL32.exe mywebsearch (or whatever, I forgot). The RUNDLL program has that "blank line" that has to be filled in, so the command to run it always includes another filename after it, that's the DLL that you have asked it to go fetch and run for you.

Someone sticks a "set house on fire" DLL card in your recipe box, steals a blank RUNDLL card and writes "set house on fire" on the blank line, and gives it you your husband... well, you see the problem. Someone could also steal your "cook pasta" DLL and replace it with one that has all the same instructions but then adds "pick up pot of boiling water and pasta and throw it against the wall of the kitchen" and sticks it back in the box... that's a virus... doesn't need a RUNDLL card, just has to sit back and wait for him to pull any recipe card for any pasta dish.

Is anyone hungry?

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