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You probably have a major system corruption, not just a language problem. Your installation of Spanish Office 2002 probably replaced a couple of 100 English DLLs with Spanish DLLs. I suspect that other software which looks for shared English DLLs is impacted also and may not function properly. In Office you probably have a Spanish spell checker now, to check your Spanish spelling. How does Internet Explorer appear? I have never done what you did, so my help can only be very limited.The easiest and only clean solution is to restore \Windows\ , \Program Files\ and \Office\ to as they were before you installed Spanish Office 2002. If you don't have such a backup, maybe uninstalling Spanish Office 2002 and then installing the corresponding English Office 2002 version might undo most of the damage. You should make a complete system backup before any further fiddling. To clearly identify what has changed by your installation of Spanish Office on top of English Win98 one would have to repeat your installation, with the same installation options, make backups before and after the installation, then compare the 2 registries and make a binary compare of all files in \Program Files\ and \Windows\ before and after.

That's also my main use use of NTFS partitions. About 4 years ago I was thinking about creating a UDF partition on my internal HDD for files >4GB, but then I put that on a back burner.UDF is supported by Win98 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/218617 [msconfig -> Advanced] and allows huge file sizes, one internet page mentions 128TB, wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems mentions "unknown". UDF is an open standard http://homepage.mac.com/wenguangwang/myhome/udf.html . At that time I had briefly installed WriteDVD! v5.06, to format a HDD as UDF. I was also looking for Disk Drive TuneUp V3 but could not find it. Here another link: http://www.raymond.cc/forum/software/11617...a-recorder.html FixDVD!/FixUDF! for Win98/ME/NT/2000/XP still seems to be sold via Digital River http://www.softarch.com/EN/Product/FixDVDUDFWin.html My concern 4 years ago was the scarcity of utilities supporting HDDs formatted as UDF. Perhaps there is also a way to format SDHC cards or USB sticks as UDF and a way to read and write big files on such UDF-formatted device under Win98.

I don't think that you have been off-topic, this is just what may happen when you install nusb: You find one can of worms after another, with more cans of worms hidden inside other cans, like a Russian Matryoshka doll , until your system is more or less clean. The cans of worms deep inside contain unsolvable multiple drive letter problems.Your nusb problems just got seriously compounded by a lack of backups.

Make sure that you have all your BIOS settings fully documented on a piece of paper, so that you can manually reset them to where they were.Another idea may be to install a fresh rudimentary 2nd Win98 opsys on a different partition, and then see whether you can get the sound card to work on the clean fresh Win98. I have used Driver Magician http://www.drivermagician.com/ (old v3.28 is good enough for me), not Driver Magic. Driver Magician was helpful in identifying drivers on my system during my installation of the HP2605dn Color LaserJet under Win98. After installing the HP driver, the category "Universal Serial Bus controllers" in Device Manager was renamed to "HPP EWS", probably because some people at Hewlett Packard thought that the only purpose of USB is to connect HP printers. nusb works fine nevertheless, the screenshot shows a 1TB USB HDD used under nusb as "USB Mass Storage Device". I have added also a screenshot of DriverMagician. nusb is not in the list of drivers of Driver Magician, Driver Magician does not regard nusb to be a driver, although MS drivers installed by nusb are indicated ("USB Mass Storage Device" and "SMSC USB Floppy", both dated 11-16-2007, in the 3rd screen shot). The SCSI controller drivers shown in screenshot 4 may (or may not) cause corruption on my system because they were not removed before installing nusb; the VAX347S SCSI controller is something of the Alcohol software. I have installed nusb after (= on top of) ASPI Layer v4.60.1021 and after the HP2605dn printer, which also has a built-in USB hub/USB Composite Device and a Win98 driver for USB Printing Support.

@dencorsoHow about removing the audio controller in Device Manager -> "Sound, video and game controllers", then rebooting to make sure that a yellow question mark appears in Device Manager, then going with a program like Driver Magician online and have the system checked for missing drivers? Also, a driver inventory as created by a program like Driver Magician might give another clue.

Yes. I have installed nusb on my old Inspiron laptop, but not yet on my dual-core desktop, for the reason dencorso just indicated: My dual-core desktop, in contrast to Dave's computer, has an ICH-5 (Intel 865G on an Asus P5PE-VM motherboard). It requires a special Intel edition of the OrangeWare driver (v1.1.0.2 of 1-Apr-2003) for the ICH-5 USB 2.0 controller.Maximus Decim has urged removing all USB 2.0 controllers, but I don't know whether nusb is able to handle ICH-5 on Intel 865G. Installing nusb on my old laptop, without uninstalling the OrangeWare driver v2.4.1 before, was also a test of whether nusb would run Ok on top of a pre-existing OrangeWare driver. Eventually I plan to install nusb also on my desktop with more recent hardware, on top of the special Intel edition of the OrangeWare driver for the ICH-5.

Hi herbalist, as I was saying to Dave in posting #2: On my old Inspiron laptop I have trouble copying between 2 attached USB multipartition 1TB HDDs. I can copy/move little amounts of data Ok between the 2 USB HDDs, but copying/moving maybe > 50MB of data causes sometimes a frozen system and minor repairable disk corruption on the partition of the target HDD, when moving files then also sometimes on the source HDD. The same happens under WinXP and when copying/moving files with Beyond Compare instead of with Win98Se/WinXP Explorer. Maybe because of the old PhoenixBIOS 4.0 Release 6.0 of 1998, but there was also once a similar problem on my desktop with a more recent BIOS.My workaround is not to transfer data directly between 2 USB mass storage devices (even between a USB DVD-Drive and a USB HDD!), but indirectly via the internal HDD. I try to avoid as much as possible to have two 1TB USB HDDs connected at the same time,

Yes. nusb must be installed upon a clean base. This may take a little while.I went against the recommendation of Maximus Decim and have not removed the USB 2.0 controllers before installing nusb. Removing the USB 2.0 controllers would also have meant uninstalling the driver and setup for my HP2605dn color-duplex USB network printer, which was just as complicated to install as nusb. I am using Orangeware v2.4.1 for all USB 2.0 PCCards and USB 2.0 hubs. I am not aware of any problems caused by continuing with the existing USB 2.0 controllers. If you want to use nusb for some devices and manufacturer-provided drivers for other USB 2.0 mass storage devices (incl. USB HDD, USB DVD drives, USB HDD docking stations), you have to: 1) uninstall all manufacturer-provided USB 2.0 mass storage drivers (check Add/Remove) 2) install nusb on a clean base 3) de-activate nusb 4) re-install the manufacturer-provided driver 5) detect the new device with the manufacturer-provided driver on ALL USB connectors 6) activate nusb again Each manufacturer-provided driver may add its own safely-remove icon to the system tray. The safely-remove icon of nusb is really amazing, it even works with a SCSI Jaz-drive connected to an Adaptec 1460 SCSI PCMCIA card: after safely removing the SCSI Jaz drive via the nusb icon, I can pull the Adaptec SCSI PCMCIA card, to which the SCSI Jaz drive is connected, out of the laptop, and everything continues to work fine, even ScanDisk! This means that before installing nusb you may have to uninstall also old SCSI stuff ... About 2 months ago, after I had test-installed Iosys98.exe plus Q277628.exe together, which shouldn't be done, a single Jaz drive appeared with SEVEN drive letters and icons in My Computer, maybe because I hadn't uninstalled the drivers for my SCSI PCCards/PCMCIA Cards, or some other SCSI devices, before installing nusb. Before I installed nusb, I installed Driver Magician. By having Driver Magician back up all drivers (incl.MS), I got a list of the drivers installed on my system, to make sure I didn't forget to remove something before installing nusb. During the house-cleaning before installing nusb, I removed old Netscape Communicator 4.80, which was quite a task. BTW, the instability problem of Adobe Acrobat 5.0 on my system disappeared after removing Netscape. Looking back at the amount of time I spent preparing a clean base for installing nusb, I might just as well have created another opsys selection in my boot menu and installed a 2nd, fresh new Win98 opsys, with nusb installed from the start, in addition to the original Win98 opsys with manufacturer-provided drivers.

Try to connect an external 5V power supply to your multicard reader. Possibly when a 2nd drive mounts, the current used is > 500mA on a single USB port. Multi-card readers work on my old laptop only with an external power supply. If you cannot connect a power supply to your multi-card reader, try to use the multi-card reader via an external USB hub with its own power supply.Make sure the power supply plugs have the correct polarity, otherwise you may damage your hardware. My favorite card-reader is a MSI multi-card reader. The only problem it has is when I power up my old Inspiron laptop with the card-reader connected, the MSI card-reader will not get a drive letter, even if the nusb safely-remove icon displays a Disk drive, without a drive letter. When I connect the MSI multi-card reader after Win98 or WinXP is up, it is recognized fine. This MSI multi-card reader works fine when connected at power-on to a new Asus Eee 1000HE, so possibly only old computers may have a power supply issue, but not new computers. Some multi-card readers work only with 1 card inserted at a time, and stop working when 2 or more cards are inserted at the same time, regardless of the power supply. Other multi-card readers work fine with multiple cards at the same time, but not with an SDHC card and a micro-SDHC card inserted at the same time. The product description page of my favorite card reader has changed, it's now here. I don't know whether the chip inside is still the same, those card readers I bought a year ago had a red LED, this one here has a blue LED, but the card readers have the same product number. BTW, MSI has marked in red letters on that page that there is a Win98SE driver for this card reader

The experimenting related to manufacturer-provided drivers and how to obtain a clean base upon which to install nusb.After nusb was installed on a clean base, I had no problems whatsoever to install under nusb a hama/Easy Line multi-card reader 00055745, which has a built-in USB hub and cards inserted into the multi-card reader appear as several drives in My Computer. A 16GB SDHC card is currently attached directly to it (I just tested it: adding a SmartMedia card in it at the same time is also Ok), plus 3 different single-card readers with 3x16GB SDHC cards are attached to the built-in USB ports, making the whole device similar to a 4x16=64GB SSD drive. Works fine both under nusb and on another computer with manufacturer-provided drivers. This multi-card reader is a special-purpose device, for daily use a single-card reader is much preferrable, or a multi-card reader which displays only 1 drive in My Computer, but they don't put this info on the packaging when you buy a multi-card reader.

There is another unofficial VID PID data base for PCI at http://www.pcidatabase.com/ which sometimes may give additional info. The file dokusb.inf installed with the Win98 driver of the Kingston DataTraveller 2.0, for example, contains a VID "08ec" which is in neither database. @Dave Try to get a simple USB stick or a single-card reader. Many multi-card readers add another dimension of possible complications, they are like several card readers plus a USB hub. One weakness of nusb is that it does not have multi-state icons in My Computer to indicate which drive displayed in My Computer actually contains the card inserted in a multi-card reader. Furthermore, the safely-remove icon of nusb in the system tray may also list 4 or 5 different devices for a multi-card reader, so that one has to repeat the safely-remove procedure 3 or 4 times before unplugging the multi-card reader, which takes just as long as a reboot. The multi-card reader MSI StarReader mini II, which displays only 1 card in My Computer, is still my preferred USB card reader http://www.msfn.org/board/sdhc-micro-sdhc-...98-t123109.html, but I don't know whether it is still available.

usb.if is a "Text - 7-Bit-File", as indicated by QuickView Plus. With QuickView Plus (v8 should do, but v10 rocks) installed under Win98: right-click on usb.if -> Quick View Plus -> content of usb.if displays fine -> select the displayed text -> copy -> paste into TextPad (or Notepad or WordPad) -> save converted fileOr just as easily: right-click on usb.inf -> select Quick Print from the context menu -> set Printer to Acrobat PDF Writer -> Ok -> enter file name in window "Save PDF File As" (usb.pdf) -> Save, and you get the attached usb.pdf. BTW, QuickView Plus v10 under Win98 converts in the same way and just as easily .docx etc files of Office 2007.

Good idea. On this page the same USB stick VID=13FE and PID=1D21 is mentioned, under Linux, with the final comment: "Thanks for you help, but life it too short for strange USB problems." In my earlier posting #47

Yes, hex 13FE is decimal 5118, and "5118" in the official USB VID list indicates "Phison Electronics Corp.". This official list can be downloaded as usb.if Maybe ChipGenius did not have the combination of VID + PID in its data base, only the VID for Phison. Maybe companies using a chip in their final product can get a special PID from the chip manufacturer. hama, for example, does not manufacture chips, but has for some products their own VID [VID, not PID!], maybe because they modified the firmware for a chip with some added features, which then requires a special driver.With the VID/PID displayed by ChipGenius I looked in google for "vid 13FE usb", to find other companies making USB sticks using the same chip, I came across Kingston Technology and takeMS. The Kingston Win98 driver can be downloaded here, the actual download location is here. I just test-installed this driver, so that I can look at the VID/PID list in the installed dokusb.inf There was no VID listed for Phison, so this driver probably won't work for Dave's stick, even if he adds a line with the VID/PID of his stick to the .inf file I have found with this trial-and-error-method, at the websites of competing device-assemblers, good drivers for SDHC card readers which came with no Win98 driver or with a Win98 driver for a different chip. Apparently chip manufacturers provide drivers to the device-assemblers, and each device-assembler fills in the blanks in the .inf file with their own VID and PID, and that's then the driver of xyz device assembler. It is unfortunatate that manufacturers of chips used in USB mass storage devices don't provide a download page with drivers for their chips. For example, to download a genesys driver one has to go to hama and download from the hama website a driver for a specific device which contains a genesys chip. Chip makers just sell their chips, customer service is provided, or not provided, by the device-assemblers or importers.

Dave, I just restored all 7 backup files rb000.cab thru rb006.cab on my system, Win98 (with nusb installed) came up fine with each set of of backup files.Maybe some hardware on your computer is failing, e.g. memory. The registry appears to be read into memory Ok, but it is not written correctly back onto your HDD. What error message is produced by scanreg.exe when you try to restore a backup which won't restore? Do you use the parameter Optimize=1 in scanreg.ini? Do you use the WinME version of scanreg? I have Scanregw.exe v4.10.1998 on my system. More info about scanreg: mdgx

After your problem is solved, maybe you should go over the entries in Add/Remove under Win98, maybe some software like IomegaWare should be uninstalled before installing nusb.

After a good backup including the install-to directories, I would get rid of this Iomega USB-related driver and also uninstall any Iomega-related software. IomegaWare had caused me a lot of headaches. Iomega made good hardware, but about drivers and software I am not so sure. Iomega stuff may have caused hidden problems on my Win98 system, but by far not as serious and obvious as Nero's InCD Reader, which thanks God has a clean separate uninstaller. After I got rid of iomega's "1-Step Backup and Restore" and "The Works", my system was MUCH crisper. In any case the installation of nusb probably requires the prior removal of all Iomega USB drivers.BTW, I just found in my old installation notes about Iomega backup software that during installation the component "Recovery Disk Creation" may be selected. Maybe you created such a zip disk and it contains a more recent backup of your registry.

Have you installed Hard Disk Low Level Format Tool under Win2k? It installs, but doesn't work under Win98.

I was asking myself a similar question. I therefore just tried Hard Disk Low Level Format Tool on a 16GB SDHC card under WinXP, it took about 20-30 minutes to clear the SDHC card. When finished, WindowsXP Properties showed: Free 0 bytes, Used 0 bytes, File system: RAW.I then used Panasonic SDFormatter on the 16GB SDHC card for a full format under WinXP, which took about 10-15 minutes; afterwards Windows Properties displayed file system: FAT32, Used space: 32.768 bytes, Free Space: 16.127.066.112 bytes. BTW, I just came across this old note, from a year ago when I was experimenting with SDHC cards: "the Panasonic SDFormatter does NOT see the SDHC card inserted in the card reader (single & multi-partition) if the card reader has been set by Hitachi Filter Driver v3.20 to fixed". It might be interesting to know whether Panasonic SDFormatter sees Dave 's 2-partition stick, but again SDHC cards and USB stick are 2 different beasts.

ChipGenius http://www.mydigit.cn/mytool/ChipGenius.rar (includes the database of 19-Oct-2009) runs under Win2k/XP (not under Win98), according to the program description, and may give info about the chip inside your dual-partition drive.Your dual-partition 2GB stick may be something special. If nusb should not work with it, you may have to install also the manufacturer-provided driver, which starts to complicate matters. In that case I would buy another USB stick (or rather an SD/SDHC card+card reader).

It may be a little far-fetched, but have you recently made a virus-check with an up-to-date virus checker? (I haven't made on my system a complete virus check for maybe a year or two, but I am restoring very frequently clean backups of \Windows\ and \Program Files\, so this might have wiped out hidden infections). Running a complete virus-check on all your files overnight may exclude this possibility.You might still have some good, old registry backups: C:\System.1st (the 1st system.dat after installing Win98). If you installed Norton Utilities and created a Rescue Disk, it probably includes a copy of the registry then. If you installed other utilities like System Suite, Fix-It Utilities etc possibly they also included a copy of the registry on their rescue disks.

HI JACLAZ, great that you joined, I am pretty much at the end of my 2 cents.Great link, I didn't know that Acronis TrueImage, Acronis Disk Director and PartitionMagic might be possibly conflicting, I got them all on my system, but TrueImageMonitor has been kept from regular startup with Startup Organizer, I don't like unnecessary startup processes. I only allow TrueImageMonitor to load at startup when I make a disk or partition image with TrueImage. BTW and a little OT, TrueImage v9.1.3887 could not even make an error-free image of the original HDD of an Asus Eee 1000HE, I eventually may uninstall it. Is there any Win98 software which could make a correct image of a modern HDD, i.e. with XP/Vista/7 partitions? Any recommendation?

I thought that Win98 creates only a new backup rb0##.cab after scanregw considered the registry Ok. Did you recently create any manual backups by running scanreg /backup ? My own \Windows\SYSBCKUP\ folder contains an old file rbbad.cab with a set of bad registry files, my rb00x.cab files however should be Ok. Maybe the files restored from your rb0##.cab don't work with other .ini files, which were not backed up??? Interesting to hear that Win98 can create registry backups which don't work I am using plain-vanilla Win98SE, you installed SP2.1, I dont know what impact that may have. I also keep all my complete backups of \Windows\ and \Program Files\, maybe a 100, since I initially installed Win98. I also have a file with a shortcut on my desktop named "Win98 Install Log.txt" (and "WinXP Install Log.txt"), which contains a chronological log/diary of all my installations, system changes and backups since November 2003. This backup procedure has allowed me to identify the best old backup version from which to install nusb. I restored Win98 as it was about 17 months earlier (backup file W98_049.rar of 3-Mar-2007), did a lot of cleanups, and then installed nusb. 17 months of software and hardware installations had to be redone, which was feasible because I am keeping a very detailed installation log.

I had encountered something similar during my experimenting with partitioned SDHC cards a year ago, with Windows seeing things which didn't exist, I was amazed at the time, but I don't remember the details anymore. I vaguely remember having deleted a partition on an SDHC card under one opsys (WinXP?), but it was still there under another opsys (Win98?, or vice versa?), but I couldn't access the files on the non-existing partition. The ghosts may have been gone after all physical devices and the SDHC card were unplugged from electricity for a few minutes, maybe it had something to do with a cold vs warm reboot, but I just don't remember anymore. I put the whole affair into the category of unsolvable multiple-drive-letter problems/phantom drives. My SDHC cards are fine now, and I probably used Panasonic SDFormatter to get a clean single-partition SDHC card.

HDD Low Level Format v2.36 may also be of use to wipe an unruly USB stick.The following applies to HDDs, I mention it here just in case that a bit in the USB stick was set to make the USB stick appear fixed/non-removable. Acronis Disk Director Suite v10.0 build 2089 has helped me clean up corrupted HDDs (right-click on Disk 1 etc -> Clear Disk), with which Partition Table Doctor and other partitioning software had problems (e.g. HDD is simply displayed as "Bad disk"). PowerQuest PartitionMagic v8.05, for example, cannot clear HDDs. I have only used Acronis Disk Director for clearing a disk; Paragon Partition Manager 9.0 can -> Hard Disk -> "Update MBR" ("overwrites the current bootable code in the MBR by the standard bootstrap code", I am not sure how that differs from Clear Disk in Acronis Disk Director). The disadvantage of clearing the disk with Acronis Disk Director is that partitioning software will not show make, model, etc of the HDD afterwards, it's a tool of last resort. Disks which I cleared in this way (incl. 1TB) do function fine afterwards. Maybe Dave should connect another single-partition USB device (camera, mp3 player), just to see whether nusb works.