The MS-DOS Stub is a valid application that runs under MS-DOS and is placed at the front of the .EXE image. The linker places a default stub here, which prints out the message “This program cannot be run in DOS mode” when the image is run in MS-DOS. The user can specify another stub by using the /STUB linker option.
At location 0x3c, the stub has the file offset to the Portable Executable (PE) signature. This information enables Windows NT to properly execute the image file, even though it has a DOS Stub. This file offset is placed at location 0x3c during linking.