The main reason is that NT shared libraries (AFAIK) don't support linking against symbols in the loading binary.
Yes, that's the impression I've gotten.
You can try enabling DLDEBUG in dlopen.c for lots of debug.
I'll give that a try; maybe I'll find something useful...
Thus the reason for the existence of pntld.
well, it certainly makes it easier to debug the linker!
Bill