Believe it or not, the -sb versions of the install package are "fully VISTA 64" compatible. (Even more incredibly, at no extra charge.)
Frank is partially correct (i.e., nothing has changed within ASHW32.EXE relative to Vista 64; the main issue was the installer itself), but if we are going to talk about "Full Vista 64 compatibility", full disclosure would suggest that we mention the following:
1. ATE.EXE itself is not Vista 64 compatible, and never will be. It has been moth-balled, even though it is still included in the distribution (simply to support existing shortcuts that reference ATE.EXE on 32 bit machines). ATE.EXE was a VB6 program, originally created before A-Shell support GUI, which simply managed the dialogs for editing the profile, and then launched ASHW32 to actually make the connection.
In ATE 5.1,the profile editing functions have been rewritten in A-Shell/Basic (using LEO) amd packaged as ATECFG.SBX, which is called by TELNET when you pass it the /I(nteractive) or /E(dit) switches. No action should be necessary to adapt to this change, except in the case where you manually move or recreate shortcuts for ATE that were referencing the old ATE.EXE. (One of the new features of the new ATE configuration dialogs is a button to create a new shortcut for you, including selection of an icon to go with it. You can use that to see what the new shortcut should look like if you want to go on creating them manually.)
2. Despite some efforts on my part to stimulate a discussion about this, there didn't seem to be any interest in trying to reorganize A-Shell's (or ATE's) directories to fit the model proposed by Microsoft with Vista. (This is not a 32 vs. 64 issue, but an issue of "programs" vs. "data".)
Under 5.0, ATE was installed into c:\Program Files\MicroSabio\ate... Vista does not approve of this plan, since the \Program Files directory is now "read-only", except for certain programs like installers that run in "elevated" mode, and therefore should only contain programs and read-only files, not data. Some of the things we put there are "true" programs (ASHW32.EXE, some DLLs, etc.), and some are for the most part read-only (RUN, LIT, ICO, images, etc), but others are pure data (INI, CFG, DAT, etc.) Vista will try to emulate the ability to update these files, by virtualizing the directory, but it confuses the hell out of an already confusing mess.
What Microsoft and Vista want is for all applications to be divided into programs (which go in the \Program Files\ directory) and various kinds of data which are organized under the \ProgramData\ or \Users\ directory trees. But no one I've talked to seems to have much of a stomach for this, so I decided to say "no thank you" to Microsoft's guidelines and instead suggest installing ATE into a top-level directory (default now being c:\ATE).
The use of top-level directories for applications is considered bad form, rude, boorish, anti-social, et cetera, but it has the nice attribute of putting the entire application into the category of "Additional files", which accomplishes three things for us:
1. It's easy to find and nicely organized into a single tree.
2. The directory tree is writeable.
3. It can easily be backed up. (Vista's new backup program doesn't even ALLOW you to select \Program Files\ directories for incremental backup. But it does provide a checkbox option for "Additional files" which will back up all those boorish un-authorized top-level directory trees.)
So if you ask a lawyer from Redmond if we are "fully VISTA 64 compatible", they might not give you the answer you want to hear, but as far as I can tell, people are happily (however ignorantly) running (and installing) A-Shell and ATE on it.
Which leads me to one last comment about VISTA 64. It has come to my attention that some big-box and office-supply stores are selling VISTA 64 machines to unsuspecting customers who merely want an ordinary PC workstation. This makes no sense to me, since VISTA 64 offers only pain and suffering (in the form of incompatibilities) to users who don't care about gaming, high-speed multi-dimensional simulations, weather forecasting, statistical modeling, or the ability to use more than 3.5GB of RAM. If you are purchasing computers on the behalf of your customers, or advising customers on the purchasing of workstations, in my humble opinion it behooves you to think twice or three times before just buying a VISTA 64 machine, just because it's "what they were selling".
