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A major administrative headache with Windows 2000 was coping with issues of compatibility with earlier applications. Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 have made a significant leap in assuring backward compatibility. A set of new technologies and support infrastructures isolate OS differences and application bugs. This greatly increases the chances that applications that support Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Millennium Edition, and Windows 2000 work on Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP. A key new technology called AppFixes solves such problems as the incorrect detection of the operating system by an application. It also addresses the issue of an application's referencing memory after it should have been freed. A database of applications, problems, and fixes drives which AppFixes are enabled. Microsoft maintains an updated database of these fixes as part of the Auto Update feature discussed in Chapter 3. In addition, the end user can enable an applications compatibility mode for custom-built applications.
When an application that ran on an earlier legacy version of Windows cannot be loaded during the setup function or if it later malfunctions, you must run the compatibility mode function. This is accomplished by right-clicking the application or setup program and selecting Properties 
selecting Compatibility selecting the previously supported operating system.
NOTE
A common duty of a system administrator is to manage software versions and builds. This responsibility is extremely time consuming and often accomplished in a less than methodical manner. Software tracing provides a means to minimize the need for checked builds. With this feature, participating components—such as a driver, kernel component, service, or application—can define their own trace events and GUIDs. As such, components can have multiple event classes defined and independently enabled or disabled. Each event retains its binary form. A trace activity can be examined while it is occurring or after the event. If the system fails the in-memory trace, it can be dumped by a debugger extension or reviewed in an appropriate tool. There is also a kernel debugger extension that has the ability to display the trace elements that remain in memory at the time of a break point or a system crash, or from a crash dump. This feature is invoked via Start Control Panel Performance and Maintenance Administrative Tools Computer Management.
The Windows installer has a group policy configuration that prevents anyone except administrators from installing non-elevated applications. In versions of Windows server products prior to Windows Server 2003, this option was not enabled by default. Windows Server 2003 enables this feature by default in order to ensure greater security out of the box.
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