win32

Try BWC's pemaker and change the installer's PE Subsystem to 5.1/5.2.

Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Parameters, there is a key labelled "NonRemovableMedia", with a list of controllers and storage devices. Theoretically, you could add your HDD under the name it identifies as in device manager to that list. That is in 2003 x86, so it should also exist in XP x64.

@Dylan Cruz Is the browser being opened by AIM, New Moon or Serpent? Only if you were to set IE to be the default would the error not appear. The wording in the second quote may have been unclear. Windows 2000 installs fine, and it boots 95% of the time as opposed to ~5% for XP (and 100% for 2003), but there are random "unknown hard error" dialogs, the instability of the firewall drivers, and Office 2007 failing to create activation-related reg keys. These issues are specific to the ThinkPad T60, which is known to produce occassional freezes when its battery is dead or removed. I'm not sure what this is all about. I do know that some virtualizers and emulators (QEMU in particular) have problems with Windows 2000 graphical setup. I spun a new ISO which fixed the setup initialization problems I had in VMware Player awhile back - and that was just SP4. Are you using the same release of the same virtualizer? Recent versions of VMware have garbled sound with 2000/XP, usually fixed once playing a song in the OS. Sound drivers for real hardware are usually very stable, except for Creative's lack of support for large memory addresses. I think you should start a new thread for non-Office-related issues. UPDATE: I returned to my VM, and discovered that even with all my edits, opening encrypted files was failing for me again. Oddly enough, slbcsp.dll was now being called by advapi32 for decryption, and the former was missing a couple API calls. I replaced it with the latest XP version and it didn't help any for it supposedly couldn't be found. I'll have to rebuild my VM once the workstation is upgraded to 2003.

@Dylan Cruz Yes, I used Dependency Walker. Opening a local html file gives me a "file not found" error before opening and "Windows Explorer is unable to run the command" with Serpent/New Moon, but not with Internet Explorer. UPDATE: Well, the same installation source that let me successfully install Office 2007 in a VM and on an Optiplex 745 under win2k keeps failing to do so on a ThinkPad T60, as certain reg keys are not added in (specifically dealing with licensing, which means it will stop working in a few days). Weird, since it works on that problematic machine under XP.

@Dylan Cruz The advapi32 from XP has missing dependencies in BWC's kernel32, so it may be possible that we may have to prepare a kernel33 if it uses the missing dependencies for anything Office-related. I got OneNote stabilized, but I could no longer get images to display in the notebooks in my test Office install. I'll look into it. User privileges strike again. New Moon/Serpent struggle with this as they are built for XP and rely on its corresponding routines for that. I wonder if it would complain in Office too if it didn't have any hex edits.

@Dylan Cruz The encryption write process is based on advapi32 calling rsaenh.dll, so I'd start with creating the advapi33 pointer for MSO.dll/Office executables. If that fails due to missing dependencies then you'd try a kernel33 being called by advapi33. At the same time I can look into any sorcery that could get Publisher and OneNote working better (tomorrow, when I'm back to the hex-core Xeon workstation with its 1.5 TB of storage). And one last crack at Office 2010 now that all that needs to be done is to remove the "Office Software Protection" service installation from the MSI. I have low expectations though, especially considering that advapi32 covers many more bases than encryption.

@Dylan Cruz I think our only way now is to keep hex editing.

The worst ones I've encountered are: -McDonald's "da da da dum McDonald's / I'm lovin' it". I remember the inaugural commercial from 2003 which consisted largely of skateboarding scenes and was heavily rotated on some Canadian TV stations. Unfortunately they failed to scrap the campaign and its latest refresh includes a five-second sounder that is repeated for the entire length of the commercial. This is one of the reasons why I stopped purchasing their products (or maybe I should buy tonnes and tonnes of their loss leaders?) -Nissan "You Pay What We Pay". This campaign featured a commercial with Nissan employees and a customer in Brady Bunch-style squares while they sang the eponymous phrase. Very annoying, as it was in heavy rotation on Canadian TV as well. And on the day when this promotion was set to go away, along with its abhorrent commercials, the singing hit me like a brick wall along with a caption indicating that the promotion was extended another week!

Believe me, that is really appealing, and I've tried the hex-editing trick en masse to try to run the games that come with Windows 7. But none of the modified W7 DLLs could be hooked and it went nowhere. You might be interested in this program used to automatically redirect APIs, ExtendAPI: However, the missing dependencies are in files such as ntdll and kernel32, which could make things difficult (you will temporarily break ntdll and kernel32 if you mess with it using extendapi). We could then add XP's files and keep hex editing and hex editing our way to... who knows.

It may work if you use his Serpent 55 build. The thread for his browsers is probably a better place to discuss this issue though. Google's AI probably thinks that every 2000/XP machine in the world has been hijacked by botnets.

No rust involved, but it sounds like a firefox 56-style build may come to XP.

"You don't have sufficient privileges to install system services" That is the issue that also prevents the installation of Office 2010, VMware Workstation 10 etc. So apparently that would need to be done is to remove the "service-based installation part" from the applicable MSIs (by looking for ServiceInstall/ServiceControl in them with Orca) and manually install the services afterward by copying the applicable service reg entries from an XP/Vista machine (in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services). Although that wouldn't help much in your case based on BWC's results.

While the stable version remains based on Chromium 69, a new build of the Chromium 78-based version (12.0.1010) has been released: http://blog.livedoor.jp/blackwingcat/archives/1991554.html I don't think we'll need it if Serpent Quantum "56-ish" comes to fruition though.

Back in the day, port scanners would be running all over the place looking for unfirewalled machines to infect. Spam dialogs through the "Messenger" service were also quite common. Even with the decreased popularity of NT5 nowadays, I've had random Saudi IPs try to connect to port 445 (SMB) when on my school network. I haven't had issues at home, probably due to the NAT routers present there. If VB lets you view the files through Windows Explorer, much like VMware's "mount HDD as network drive", then the answer would be obvious. I think we could have advapi33, but there are some missing dependencies in win2k. There are pointers to it in mso.dll, all Office executables, and rsaenh.dll.

Now keyboard input gets all messed up on my win10 laptop. Trying to play a game, then wondering why most of the control keys aren't working. Then I open an explorer window, type the letter "w" into the search bar and it closes the window! Things were fixed after doing ctrl-alt-del. And now the OS denies me the right to kill an important process... steam.exe. Stop trying to be iOS. And Valve and the developers of the game* I was running need to learn about quality control too. *I wanted to go into my game's forum to see if anyone else lost the ability to zoom using a touchpad. the latest update fixed it though.

I am going to reinstall win2k on this laptop tonight or tomorrow. Kerio isn't as unstable on other machines, and I get plenty of "unknown hard error" dialogs too, so I think that some of the drivers (especially the ATI driver) are also causing problems on win2k. I think I'll install extended core + XP video driver and see if it stabilizes things. The thing about not using a firewall on NT5 is that it has a reputation of getting infected with worms like blaster within seconds of being connected directly to the Internet. There's a built-in IPSEC-based solution but it can be a little difficult to set up. I'm gonna try VB6 before I format. If prompts come up during the installer to replace files, please put "no". After further review of the setup files, I see crypt32.lib, but no crypt32.dll. If you can get into safe mode or have another method of viewing the OS partition, can you tell if there are any files in system32 dated 1997 or 1998? UPDATE on Office: I looked at a successful save of an encrypted word document on XP and found that it was all advapi32.dll calling rsaenh.dll, while on win2k it goes straight to the error dialog. Maybe rsaenh.dll needs the regsvr32 treatment, but it could be far deeper. And changing advapi32.dll to the XP version would probably be a disaster.

@Dylan Cruz Just as I was reading your post, my machine BSOD'd due to an issue with the Kerio firewall driver. I can't switch to XP because it has an odd issue on this laptop where it will freeze when the boot screen is fading in 90% of the time. So I think I may have to switch to Server 2003, unless it has the same startup problem. UI-wise it's much closer to 2000 than XP while having more APIs than XP. But VB6 is from 1998. Did win9x/NT4 even have crypt32.dll? I thought DLL hell was mostly a 9x issue, and such files shouldn't be replaced in a win2k install due to winsxs. Maybe you should have set NNN4NT5 to 2000 for that installation, but I don't think that should have made much of a difference.

@Dylan Cruz I wasn't being as specific as I should have. Has this changed anything in Outlook, since your Outlook crashes were due to a fault in the win2k DLL? The user privilege issue is gonna be hard to tackle. I'm not sure how exactly this is implemented in the OS, but I'm looking at "acl" (Access Control Lists) DLLs and any others related to user accounts. Since only Office 2007 needs a workaround, they may only need to be implemented via DLL redirection by hex, but some of those DLLs are using a few imports that haven't been implemented in the extended kernel yet. Or maybe the links to ACLs are implemented in the crypto DLLs, and I'd need to analyze using something deeper than Dependency Walker (windbg, ollydbg, or maybe IDA Pro 5.0 free edition). I'm quite surprised that I was even able to get reading of encrypted files working in the first place.

@Dylan Cruz As I said, it appears that the OS isn't properly providing write privileges to the encrypted Word file. Given that this program is intended for XP (and using XP's crypt32.dll), it's probably expecting a different routine. But the version.dll in XP seems to be fully compatible with extended Windows 2000. Version number is 5.1.2600.5512, so the original SP3 version should suffice.

@Dylan Cruz The Outlook crypt32 error happens when it thinks it's running on anything else but XP. And the encryption issue seems to do with user privileges, which are handled differently in XP. That is the same issue that is preventing us from installing Office 2010 and VMware Workstation 10! The other way around would be to replace even more win2k native/BWC DLLs and run the risk of even greater breakage. I don't have that amount of time until I can get a few other commitments out of the way, which should take me a week. Because that does sound kinda fun!

@Dylan Cruz That happens to me too. Probably because it expects a different XP-style UI rendering routine, but can't confirm.

@Dylan Cruz Click "Manual Update" on the left sidebar, then several English search fields will come up.

@Dylan Cruz Install the latest root certificate update (July 2019) from blackwingcat's Windows Legacy Update (http://www.w2k.flxsrv.org/wlu/wluen.htm) I did find consistency to the crashes; they happen when attempting to open an unread email for me. I marked them all as read and the crashes stopped.

@Dylan Cruz Same. But it is a very important file as far as Office is concerned. Have you tried Search?

@Dylan Cruz Program Files/Common Files/Microsoft Shared/OFFICE12.