Microsoft Reportedly Ends P2P Win32 services on Windows 11 and 12

Microsoft may soon be planning to shut down P2P Win32 services under Windows. The upcoming versions of Windows 11 23H2 and Windows 12 are affected. The information comes from an insider preview.

P2P Win32 services “Gone”

Insider builds are primarily intended to test new functions and changes for Windows before they go into distribution. The volunteer testers also always have an overview of what has changed in the latest version.

This time that is not the case. The discovered changes have not yet been announced or confirmed by Microsoft. However, an attentive tester noticed that Microsoft has several DLL files related to peer networks, such as B. those for distributed routing and peer-to-peer services, from the System32 folder of recent builds. Windows build 25951 is affected.

DLL files are so-called dynamic program libraries that are used, for example, to execute certain functions in Windows.

In his test, well-known leaker Xeno found that exactly a dozen such files were removed from one version to another by Microsoft, resulting in three such services no longer being available. Xeno published a list of files that are now missing.

Removed DLL files

• drt.dll (Distributed Routing Table)
• drtprov.dll (Distributed Routing Table Providers)
• drttransport.dll (Distributed Routing Table Transport Providers)
• Groupinghc.dll (Grouping Helper Class)
• P2P.dll (Peer-to-Peer Grouping)
• P2PGraph.dll (peer-to-peer representation)
• p2pnetsh.dll (peer-to-peer NetSh helper)
• p2psvc.dll (peer-to-peer services)
• pnrpauto.dll (PNRP Auto Service Dll)
• Pnrphc.dll (PNRP helper class)
• pnrpnsp.dll (PNRP namespace provider)
• pnrpsvc.dll (PNRP Service Dll)

As a result, the following services have been removed:

• Peer Name Resolution Protocol
• Peer networking group
• Peer Networking Identity Manager

One can currently only speculate as to why these DDL files are missing. The most likely theory is that these features will be deemed non-essential and removed in Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 11 23H2 update. If that is the case,

the P2P features will not only be in Windows 11 version 23H2, but also in the next major one Windows version commonly referred to as Windows 12 is missing.

However, these services are quite old (two decades). For example, the Peer Name Resolution Protocol (PNRP) was developed in the XP days as a solution to some of the drawbacks of DNS. Of course, it is still in the testing phase and Microsoft could reintroduce it in future versions.