PE Explorer Editor's Review

'PE Explorer' allows you to view the insides of any executable file. It provides tools for editing resources contained by executable files and for disassembling binaries. The program can be used to reverse engineer PE (Portable Executable) files. The application comes with lots of features, including a resource editor, an API function viewer, a DLL dependency scanner, and a timestamp adjuster.

When you start the program, a special panel appears. This panel is a welcome dialog that shows a list of the most important program features. After you open a supported file (EXE, DLL, OCX, SYS, CPL, and so on), the information panel is replaced by the header information. The data about the program's resources, relocations table, and imported libraries are available. Depending on the way the file was compiled, debug information may also be accessible.

You can also choose to disassemble the file by accessing the Tools menu. After asking you to select which instruction sets to use, the machine code representation of the file opens in a new window. MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2, and SSE3 instructions can be recognized. You can add comments, search through the listing, or save the code to a file.

Pluses: Removing debug information from a file is supported. Suppose we have the following scenario. A programmer builds an application, adding debug info to it. Later, he wants to distribute it, but he can't find the source code. PE Explorer can easily be used to remove debug information from the application.

Drawbacks / flaws:

In conclusion: If you only need a PE resource editor, I would recommend ResHacker which is free. Otherwise you may want to download and try this program.