A self-dissolving archive contains compressed data that should in theory decompress itself when run. The primary problem is that it will be platform specific and will only decompress properly on the same type of platform that was used to create it. Similar in principle to a self-extracting archive but different in practice. Note too that StarOffice (pre version 6.0) saves its drawing program documents with this extension; these can be read on any machine with StarOffice or OpenOffice installed (available for many platforms including WinTel boxes, Macs, OS/2 boxes, and several types of UNIX boxes).