Microsoft's patent applies (Score 1)

I remember a while back, ./ flamed microsoft's patent what posters thought were soft-links. A closer reading of the patent showed anyone who cared that what th ey were patenting was a method permitting the OS to keep dynamically a single co py of repeated identical file blocks. This technique could be applied to solve t he DLL hell problem efficiently. Every application includes its own DLLs in the installation. The OS automatically figures out that some of them are replicate d and keeps only one copy of the block.

If some application is upgraded, then the OS will detect a change in the file an d remove that particular instance from the shared data block. This technique ca n be applied both to memory, as well as to disk storage therefore completely sol ving the problem, efficiently and with zero configuration (because it is done dy namically).