LinLog

I discovered something enlightening and annoying this morning: PowerShell uses different execution policy settings for the 32-bit and 64-bit versions.  This is something I did not know and did not expect.

I'd seen this problem before, but could never figure out what was happening.  I'd try to run a command through PowerShell using another program, in this case Vim, and it would fail with the standard error about execution of my profile.ps1 being prohibited by the execution policy setting.  Yet when I bring up Powershell on the command line, everything works and the execution policy looks correct:

PS pgeer> Get-ExecutionPolicy -List Scope ExecutionPolicy ----- --------------- MachinePolicy Undefined UserPolicy Undefined Process Undefined CurrentUser Undefined LocalMachine RemoteSigned

Well, it turns out we're talking about two different versions of Powershell.  When I run it from the terminal, I'm using the 64-bit version.  But my Vim build is 32-bit, which apparently means that it's running the 32-bit version of Powershell.  And that version uses its own execution policy setting.  You can confirm that by explicitly opening "Windows Powershell (x86)" from the start menu and running Get-ExecutionPolicy.  

As for the fix, it's simple: just run Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned as admin, but do it in both the x86 and x64 versions of Powershell.

As for why Microsoft chose to make the different builds use different execution policies, I couldn't say.  It doesn't make much sense to me.  Although, to be honest, I'm not sure why I even need both versions on the same system.  Maybe to support interop between commandlets and unmanaged code?  Who knows?