CreateProcess All processes in Windows are eventually created by this function. It provides a bewildering array of parameters which cover every eventuality, but most of these can be set to default values. CreateProcess is the fastest way of loading a process, and is the preferred method. These two functions perform a slightly different task. The Unicode consortium was formed to solve the problem of character encoding.
Unicode support is widespread.
However, all Windows APIs use Unicode internally. This is slower than just using Unicode natively - so it's important that Windows NT applications should run on Unicode. The catch is that Windows 95 and 98 do not support Unicode APIs. This is due to their 16-bit Windows heritage. So if you call the Unicode APIs directly, you will lose the ability to run on Windows 9x.