It seems that by moving to VS 2010, we have killed Windows 2000 support, for the same reason VS 2012 would kill XP support: Windows 2000 apparently won't recognize the .exe files as executables anymore. I haven't actually tested this: can somebody please confirm? A year ago, Brian put a statement into PEP 11 that 3.3 would support Windows 2000 still, but with a warning. Under my recent PEP change, Windows 2000 does not need to be supported anymore since 13.07.2010, when Microsoft's extended support expired. So I propose to just remove the claim from the PEP that 3.3 would still be supported, and not go through any notification period. Objections? As a consequence, we could then change some of the deferred-loading stuff for "new" (i.e. XP+) API into proper linking. Regards, Martin