Anatomy of a .NET Assembly - The CLR Loader stub

In Windows XP and above, the OS loader knows natively what to do with .NET executable assemblies, and fires up an instance of the CLR. However, .NET also runs on Windows 98, ME, NT 4.0, and 2000. When you run a .NET assembly on the older operating systems, the CLR has to be loaded somehow. This is the job of the CLR loader stub; a section of native code within a .NET assembly. Executing a PE