thank you for your answers, I'm really satisfied with the great explanations provded by both @eskimo and @hoffman. I can see now the implications of attempting to run 32 bit stuff on my 64bit machine is a bad idea because of the security and development requirements now. I'll rest easy knowing that the best way to run my 32-bit apps is in a VM. I'd really rather not reimplement a ton of kernel stuff and fix a million libraries to work on the newest OSX, I had assumed I could just grab the old library source and get that running, but I can see thats not how it really works. "can't be done" I can see why that's an answer :) Thank you both for clearing this up for me.