Hi,

can some one tell me what the difference between portable executables and "normal executables" is?

The Portable Exe (PE) is just a term given to all exe's which adhere to the PE format. Just about all the exe's youll deal with will be PE's. Its called portable because all versions of NT use this format, regardless of the machine architecture theyre running on. There's not really such a thing as a 'normal executable', other formats that exist are the old DOS MZ format, LE (16bit Windows and VXD) and NE. Youre unlikely to ever need to know the format of LE/NE.

PE guides can be found at http://carpathia.cjb.net/pe_format.zip

Regards

Carpathia