The pifmgr.dll still lingers in modern Windows installations - a throwback to a simpler and blockier time, according to veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen.

As with the icons found in moricons.dll and progman.exe , pifmgr.dll contains a set of icons designed in an era when color and pixels were considerably more limited than the artistic endeavors of today. This author remembers squinting at a 16 x 16 grid to create something the user might recognize, using just 16 colors.

Microsoft filled pifmgr.dll with a selection of icons that a user might find handy to represent an MS-DOS application on the Windows desktop.

"The pifmgr.dll file was added in Windows 95," explained Chen. "Its job was, as the name might suggest, to manage PIF files, which are Program Information Files that describ

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