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WinHelp Viewer for Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 (KB917607)

With the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft decided that the good old WinHelp format no longer met its standards. When your users try to open a .hlp file on Windows Vista or later, they’ll get an error message saying your application is using an outdated format for its help. The error message has a link to Microsoft’s knowledge base article KB917607.

Microsoft did make the WinHelp viewer available as a separate download. The KB917607 page on Microsoft’s site still links to the downloads for Windows 8 and 8.1. Microsoft removed the downloads for Windows Vista and Windows 7. For your convenience, all the downloads are available here. The downloads are different for each version of Windows. You need the 32-bit download if you’re running the 32-bit version of Windows and the 64-bit download if you’re running the 64-bit version. The bitness of the download you need depends on the operating system, not the application that uses WinHelp for context-sensitive help.

All the downloads are offline Microsoft Update files with an .msu extension. You can verify that these are original files from Microsoft by right-clicking the file you downloaded in Windows Explorer. Select Properties. Click on the Digital Signatures tab. You should see one or two signatures with “Microsoft Corporation” as the name of the signer. Click the Details button. It should say “This digital signature is OK”. If you see anything else or if the Digital Signatures tab is missing then you have a file that was tampered with.

The downloadable WinHelp viewers for Windows Vista and later are not identical to the WinHelp viewer that shipped with Windows XP and earlier. In particular, Microsoft has disabled the WinHelp viewer’s ability to execute macros. A common use of WinHelp macros is to link to external files or URLs. Microsoft thinks those could pose a security risk.

The WinHelp viewer is not available for Windows 10 and 11 or for Windows Server 2012 and later. The first paragraph of Microsoft’s KB917607 article states this. To provide context-sensitive help with your applications for Windows 10 or 11 you’ll need to convert your help files to CHM format.