Errrrrrrrrrr. If your talking about VC6 - that was shiped in 98. If you set WINVER to 0x500 to target Win 98 and 2k, you will get a message saying that the headerd included with VC6 are for the BETA versions of these OS's. Yes, you don't need to install the new platform SDK for most things. But the one that comes with VC6 can only really be used to offically target NT and 95.... Anything that 98 has and 95 doesn't, you should use a newer SDK.