DLL Viewer/editor

What program would be needed to view and/or edit the .dll files, specifically, for plugins. Currently, if I try to open them, it brings up notepad++ and shows "NULL" all over the place.

I'm wanting to make some tweaks or adjustments to some windower plugins that are either too low of a priority for the windower people to get to anytime soon or not of enough interest for them to mess with at all (assuming I can figure out how to make those adjustments).

you cannot open and edit a dll like a text file, you would need the source code(or a way to decompile it?) the dll was written from, only then you would be able to edit > recompile.

I found this amazing guide that will help you: http://bit.ly/GQ5IQ5

Yeah, those plugins can't be decompiled. What is broken that you're trying to fix?

Things I'd like to fix or adjust:

Windower 3: Currently, I still use it because it scales with the background resolution instead of menu resolution, but it has been pretty much abandoned, I'd like to figure out how to fix things as they get broken (such as this last update making Blinkmenot not work properly (I still blink unless I set it to "always self on") and something has started crashing the game occasionally (possibly spellcast).
I understand that Windower 4 has become the more popular choice and that 3 isn't going to be maintained anymore, so I'd like to learn to do it for myself (unless I can make some adjustments to 4).

Windower 4: I'd like to see if I can adjust the scaling options. Currently, it scales with the menu resolution (which keeps plugin elements in their proper places (such as the numbers from TParty), but for people like myself who play with a high background resolution and much lower menu resolution, it makes it so that those elements are very large and highly pixelated (Attainment is quite large (and the console is HUGE, but it can be hidden, so it's not a big deal) and the font size for Status timers can be adjusted, but to make it small enough to not overlap itself, it becomes really blocky (like 8bit NES numbers).

There are always ideas coming up, but those are the ones I can think of at this moment.

I have found a few .dll editors and/or decompilers and attempted see what I could figure out, but the ones I've found weren't very helpful (such as one having two columns, one with nothing but hex code, the other machine code with some text intermixed in spots), so I was hoping that a better program could be recommended. I'm not afraid to learn how to do stuff, I just need a place to start.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/205059/is-there-a-c-decompiler

As far as the background resolution problem, all either windower has ever done is write to FFXI's registry values. There's no reason that FFXI should look different if you have the same registry values for both. You can view these if you open up regedit and go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Wow6432Node/PlayOnline/SquareEnix/FinalFantasyXI

Open up FFXI with v3.4 (the settings you like) and check what these settings are. Then open FFXI up with v4.0 (the settings you dislike) and see which numbers have changed. If you run the launcher (so POL is up) and then change the settings in the registry, you should be able to perfectly emulate v3.4. Let me know if that works and then we'll see if we can figure out which v4 settings you need to make it happen.

So...I opened POL using Windower 3, checked the specified folder in Regedit (mine is /PlayOnlineUS/ but otherwise the same), entered the values into notepad for comparison, closed both POL and Regedit and repeated the process with Windower 4. As far as I can see, none of them changed. I also checked the Windower folders in Regedit, but all of the entries list "value not set" (except "version" and "last version check" in a couple of the subfolders). Going further, I looked into the /PlayOnlineUS/Interface folder, but those values didn't change either.

Listing the entries in the specified folder:

It may be easier if you use ffxi calc to read the values.

http://www.ffxicalculator.com/

run as admin and click the ffxi settings tab then click load settings.

In the resolution box it will show Display Resolution, Background Resolution, and Menu Resolution.

I use that program sometimes too (such as to set the menu resolution with 3.4, since menu resolution was never added to 3.4 after being added to the game). The settings for resolution in the registries are simple enough, the 2 sets of 1920x1080 are the overlay and background resolution and the 1280x720 set is menu resolution.
For the sake of testing, I set my menu resolution to 1920x1080 and started v4 (and set the UI Scale to x1.0) and the windower elements were all sized the same as they are in 3.4 (which comes out the same regardless of menu resolution), but it also meant that the normal game menus were tiny and setting the menu resolution to 1280x720 (or 1.5x UI Scale in Windower 4) resulted in the oversized windower elements in v4.

As far as I can see, the Windower 4 elements are still tied to the menu resolution. (As a sidenote: After doing some testing with various settings, I've found that in 3.4 the Windower elements scale with the overlay resolution, rather than the background resolution as I had previously stated (I had always kept them the same before, so attributed it to the wrong resolution)

For the sake of clarification between SE's terms and FFXICalculator's terms, and the 2 Windower's terms, the different resolution settings match up as follows:
SE__________FFXICalc_____3.4
Overlay______Display______Overlay
Background___Background__Background
Menu________Menu_______N/A (never got added)

Windower 4 refers to the overlay simply as resolution, supersampling doubles that value and applies it to the background resolution if turned on, and UI Scale uses the resolution value to achieve the desired menu resolution.