Well, here I am posting in my "own" thread again, in case someone else has this problem and searches it on MSFN, here is what I found out. First, I was wrong about deskw95, it is part of W98SE distribution and not 98Lite. I couldn't see it for the same reason that 98Lite was having trouble installing: Windows install usually looks for files in the install directory, not finding them I believe it uses the layout.inf files to determine which cab to extract from. This is a robust way of finding the file, even if one cab at the beginning of the chain is damaged, it doesn't affect the others. Yes, the cabs form a chain, a doubly linked list is implemented in the header of each cab file. And this is where you can have problems if a cab file is damaged and has been replaced with its contents as 2 of mine have been. The other way to get files from the cabs is to follow the chain, searching for the correct file name, this is also a good way to do it if you don't want or need to parse the layout.inf files because each Windows distribution has a different cab file layout. This is the way the DOS extract command also works. The solution was to change the headers of the cab files on either side of the gap to point to each other rather than the missing files. In addition there is a "serial number" like feature in each cab file in the chain and these must be sequential or "Extract" will refuse to follow the chain. It is a (byte??) value at offset 22h in the cab file. So I had to hack these as well in all the cab files after the missing ones. so my apologies to Shane Brooks and 98Lite, their software is not broken although it would be nice if their knowledge base and FAQ were up... SHELL32.DLL replacement Well, here is the part that I hope will be interesting to 98 fans on this site. Although 98 lite ran without a hitch, I still couldn't get the "Sleek" option to work. Reason being, it used the 98 version of shell32.dll not the 95 version, now I could easily have caused this with all the shuffling of dll's this week. But this got me thinking, what is the relationship between these two patches? What if someone installs 98lite and reverts to the 95 shell32, then installs the 98 shell32 patch ( so that if one goes back to chubby mode, everything will work ). Does the shell32 patch recognize this correctly? Reason I bring it up is that this is the order recommended in at least one post and I don't recall any comments on it. Any takers?