I've been developing on VC++ 2003 on an XP PC but am now on Windows 7 and bought a cheap legal copy of VS 2008 to continue work on the same project. My product has to continue to run on customers' XP systems, so I'm strictly interested in a 32-bit executable.

The first issue I ran into was the PRJ0003 error "spawning cl.exe". I had to add the path to this file to the VC++ Directories settings (it appears in both a bin\amd64 and bin\x86_amd64 directory, but I don't think it matters output-wise which I use?).

The issue I now have (not counting a tedious cleanup to convert strcpy to strcpy_s, etc.) is that I'm not clear on whether I'm generating a 32-bit or 64-bit exe out of this. My project properties are set to a target of "Win32", so I assume that all is well. Is this correct?

I have read some discussions about this, but it's never quite clear if they are talking about whether the compiler itself is running x64 vs. x86, or whether the compiled code is x64 vs. x86, and how this is differentiated.

So am I doing the right thing to generate a 32-bit, Win32, x-86 program?