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Paul O’Rear [MS] (was a Help MVP) has finally got his Namespace# 2.0 tool released on the MS web site. And it’s free! :-) 

A nice MS Help 2.0 diagnostics tool that goes beyond the features of Namespace.exe (free tool with VS SDK). It allows you to view all Help 2.0 namespaces on your system and drill into the files and information associated with each namespace.

• http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/NamespaceSharp
  Click on the “Download” tab.

Great tool. Very similar features to our FAR H2 Utilities and reads Namespace information a little faster than FAR. Requires .NET 2.0 runtime (which you should already have if VS is installed).

WinHelp is a bit outdated and you may ask for a newer system which is a good replacer for WinHelp. Try the successor to WinHelp, HTMLHelp 1.x, which uses HTML topic files and provides an API for some programmatic access. HTMLHelp can be generated using Microsoft’s HTML Help Workshop tool, which produces a .CHM file but it’s a bit outdated too.

For the current state of play, see this article:
http://www.winwriters.com/articles/news/news_2007_1201.htm

You may also want to take a look at “Converting WinHelp (HLP) to HTMLHelp (CHM)”:
http://www.help-info.de/en/Help_Info_WinHelp/hw_converting.htm