C# Assembly.Load() method loads the wrong dll?

Problem Statement

I’m implementing some sort of a Shadow Copy in C# when loading dll, to prevent the dll file from being locked. It works as follows:

1. Say I have sample.dll and want to load it into the appdomain without locking it
2. First I make a copy of the assembly with the name sample_shadow.dll in the same directory
3. Then I load sample_shadow.dll with Assembly.Load (Assembly.LoadFrom and AssemblyName.GetAssemblyName are also tried)
4. After that, the loaded assembly appears to have a base location of sample.dll instead of sample_shadow.dll, and sample.dll is locked

Constraints

I know I can use Assembly.Load(byte[]) or Assembly.LoadFile() to achieve this. But they can’t be used (at least I didn’t figure out how), because of a rather complicated situation:

• I have one shell dll that dynamically loads a function dll
• The function dll contains some static variables that is updated by the shell dll
• There are still three more dlls that references the function dll (statically)
• I wish the three dlls could see the updates on the static variables in the function dll made by the shell dll… (this is too much)
• LoadFile() or Load(byte[]) breaks this behavior, but Load(string) and LoadFrom() preserve this behavior

Questions

1. I’d like to know how can I load sample_shadow.dll correctly and thus prevent sample.dll to be locked
2. I’d appreciate very much if someone can elaborate on the mechanisms in the background

Thanks in advance!