After having nearly completely given up hope on ever using the Plazer again, I have discovered a way to make the geo-location application work on my Windows Vista x64 laptop.  If you read my previous post, you know that I had tried to go the route of the Plazer forums to see if there were any known workarounds.  At one point I believe a member of the Plazes Crew even chimed in and said it would require re-coding a significant portion of the .NET application.  Nonsense!

It probably goes without saying that this workaround is just that…  a workaround.  It is not officially endorsed by the Plazes Crew so your mileage may vary.

The basic idea here is to tell the .NET Framework to run the Plazer as a 32-bit process instead of a 64-bit process.  Because as we have seen before, running the Plazer as a 64-bit process yields some silly error about creating a new mutex.  Whatever that means?!?

In order to tell the .NET Framework to run the Plazer as a 32-bit process, you’ll need to download and install the .NET SDK, which can be downloaded directly from Microsoft.  You’ll also want to make sure the Plazer is installed, but you already knew that.

Installation of the .NET SDK is a fairly straightforward process.  Once you have the SDK installed you can use the corflags.exe utility to set the 32-bit flag.  I found it easiest to change to the directory where the corflags.exe utility is stored:  C:\Program Files\Microsoft.NET\SDK\v2.0 64bit\Bin

Finally issue the following command:

corflags.exe "C:\Program Files (x86)\plazes.com\Plazer 2.0\plazes.plazer.2.0.exe" /32BIT+

For a little more information on the corflags.exe utility you may want to read this blog post on Flipping bits on managed images to make them load with the right bitness…

That’s it!  Now you should be able to run the Plazer on your 64-bit operating system as a 32-bit process.