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.

The shame of the whole thing is that I really like using the Plazer and I don’t want to stop using it.  I like the concept and if I could find a replacement I would use it in a heartbeat.

OK, so by now you’re probably wondering why I’m going to stop using it.  Well, Plazes was recently acquired by Nokia, and since that acquisition, the Plazes Crew has been hard at work on something new and exciting.  So new and exciting in fact that they have decided to release absolutely no details as to what they are working on.

The Plazer needs some work, which is the real reason that I am going to have stop using it.  I have not been able to get the Plazer to check in reliably since I switched to Windows Vista.  But, even under Windows Vista I was able to get the Plazer to run and I could perform a manual check in.  Along came 64-bit Windows Vista… and PRESTO!  No more Plazer.

I have posted messages in the Plazer support forum, sent emails to the Plazes Crew, but still have not come up with any answers.  I even considered using some kind of application virtualization to trick the Plazer into working on my laptop, but I really don’t think I should have to go that far.

My fear is that since Plazes was acquired by Nokia and since Nokia has fairly vested interest in the cell phone market that the application development efforts are focused solely on creating a GPS or cell tower based geo-location service for… Nokia devices.

I hope that I am proven wrong and I hope that one day the Plazer will once again live in my system tray, but until then… goodbye Plazes.