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Windows 7 will provide a standardization on the different versions of libraries as its base API instead of managing multiple versions. The reason for the original problem was that certainapplications relied on specific quirks exhibited by libraries that were not properly documented, and therefore fixes to these libraries would break the applications. This clean break will allow MS to focus on a leaner codebase, and will relegate backwards compatibility to a legacy environment similar to the way OS X has “Classic” to run applications from OS 9 and previous. However, this also has interesting implications on the antitrust situation:

This also allows Microsoft to neatly sidestep the DoJ and EU anti-trust rulings, as including the MSHTML library (Internet Explorer’s rendering engine) in the monolithic libraries would provide support for the old rendering functions of Explorer to legacy applications while still remaining hidden from the end-user, the primary complaint in the antitrust cases. [The Beta Guy]