InterLinked

What is the proof of this? I haven't heard of a successful install. To use 2010 in 2000, I use a Server 2003 VM in Unity (seamless) mode so I can double click a desktop shortcut and work with Office 2010 programs natively in W2K (see w2k.phreaknet.org/guide)

Hey, just saw this post, @win32 knows everything, but I was in the same boat as you a few months ago, and I put together this guide as a result: https://w2k.phreaknet.org/guide/ Maybe you'll find parts of it helpful...

@win32 Yeah, I guess that's too bad. I just tried running the .exe and this is what I get: test.bmp I wish life were good but I still haven't found away around the encryption issue, and now this one spreadsheet which looks good in modern Excel doesn't work properly in Excel 2007, and it's not clear why. It does support the features, it's just color scaling, so I don't know what's up. All very bizarre. And on top of that, fonts in W2K just aren't what they are in modern Windows. Not sure if it's ClearType or TrueType or font smoothing or what, but all my settings seem to be good and it still looks weird. It makes sans-serif fonts look like serif fonts. However, when I view PDFs, it all look goods. MailNews works well on W2K, so if Outlook is a no-go, at this point, I would be very happy if I could just get encryption and documents to work. Not to mention full media support, most video and audio formats still don't work. GOM Player works but it's just an awful experience. Wish I could use VLC. GOM Player feels like bloatware and looks horrendous! I guess you're happy with Server 2003, but some of the W2K stuff can't be reproduced there, like what it all looks like when booting up and what not. It doesn't seem possible to get rid of the Luna theme until you login. Unless disabling Themes does the trick? Can you speak to this? Is it possible to use Windows Classic 100% of the time, even at the logon screen? It's not clear all that much is different in the UI/UX between 2003 and XP. I know there's Windows inExperience Patcher for XP, but it's rather a mess, not sure if you've used it. The fonts are off, and it only applies per user. Far from perfect. I just love the way the start button looks in W2K, for instance, absolutely perfect, as well as the way "Windows 2000 Professional" looks when you click start. The latter can't be reproduced.

@win32So I've not been able to solve the bginfo thing, I guess it's just a bug in Windows that there's no hope for being fixed so might as well live with it. I recall you said you were looking into Office 2010 on W2K. Do you know if all the programs, except perhaps Outlook, work on W2K? I notice that in Excel 2007, some of the color scale formatting is off in one of the tables (not applied to all rows in the table). In modern Excel, it looks normal. I can't reapply the color scale in 2007, because I don't see anything. So perhaps this is a bug that doesn't exist in 2010, but I don't know if that will install and run. Interestingly, MailNews is not as stable on Windows 10, but it runs seamlessly on W2K.

bginfo is supposed to be per user. Among other things, I have it display the username. I actually use a fairly simple bginfo, with just computer name and username. I've also seen MAC address on there before, though I don't know how often these organizations have need of a PC's MAC address that they stick it right on the desktop, but OK. So, yeah, when I log out, it shows the last logged on username, which is a bit weird.

Sorry to hear that. Hopefully I have better luck. Sorry, but it's not actually about group policy or domains, it's just the wallpaper issue. bginfo is just a tool used by a lot of organizations for their domains, but anyone can use it. Do you use the default wallpaper on your 2000/XP/2003? It seems like the bug exists in both.

@win32 Awesome! Sounds like we can have our cake and eat it, too! A usable and secure OS... And maintenance costs go down, b/c no more Windows Updates, I suppose... Thanks for the info. Were you able to get your Win2K working again or are you still on 2003? I uncovered what seems like a 2000/XP bug today: Currently, bginfo runs as part of the logon script and writes the computer name and username to the desktop. When a user logs out, the desktop background is still there. I didn't notice this on computers that didn't use bginfo since the default blue wallpaper is used for both. I have the Group Policy to not display the last logged in user enabled, but it doesn't really "work" in the sense that, since the last logged on user's wallpaper is display on the logon screen, one can still tell who was last logged in. The last user's wallpaper still appears even after a restart, so it's not just some transient thing. How can I disable this behavior - e.g. force the logon screen to always show the plain, vanilla wallpaper and not any user's background?

@win32 I got this comment about running Windows 2000 freely today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EternalBlue Indeed, no patches have been issued for Win2K, which is a real shame. Is it safe to apply the XP patches for WannaCry and EternalBlue to Windows 2000? Or, as long as you don't do certain things, are you safe and immune already on Win2K?

Correct.

I tried installing 2.6 and 2.1 but they both said they required Vista or threw some other error. Same with 1.1 I think. The one from ME ran fine. Well, nothing wrong with 2 birthdays, I suppose. We'll celebrate Windows 2000's 2nd 20th birthday on the 17th of the 2nd month of 2020. I don't think BWC would be necessary on a server anyways. You wouldn't be installing Office or web browsers on there anyways, so there's no reason to modify the kernel.

It opens in New Moon. As much as I don't hate IE, it's not practical to have anything open in it, since most things won't work. It'd be nice to have it all open in New Moon. What do you mean activation-related reg keys? I have a volume copy so perhaps that doesn't apply to me. On a related note, will the XP Movie Maker work in W2K, or only the ME version? I've only been able to get the ME version to work. If it's good enough though, I guess it's alright. I'm using Virtual Box. I considered using HyperV, but it's probable I'll need to run Unix-type stuff in Virtual Box some time in the future on here so it's not worth it. Soon I'll have a separate PC for W2K so it won't matter. Audio just doesn't work very well in VMs at all. Sorry about that. My main issue still is the encryption, although I've not had much time to look more into it. That and audio is preventing me from using it for everything, but that's about it. W2K is really as good/better than it's cooked up to be. Also, yesterday (the 15th) was Windows 2000's 20th birthday! We were celebrating over here... So you're not going to have 2000 as your main OS, just Server 2003? Considering there are three server variants of W2K and just one Windows Server 2003, I'm tempted to try out the different W2K servers at some point. Probably at least to set up a domain for all my W2K machines.

Yeah, that's similar to what happens to me. So weird. I would say it might be the new browsers, but it happens with AIM too, so it must be more general than that. Something really weird was that I told a friend to follow the same steps as I to set up W2K in a VM so he can use it more, since his actual W2K machine is drastically underpowered (I think it has a Pentium 4 or something like that). For some reason, after using HFSLIP, it would not install, setup just kept restarting and crashing. He had installed vanilla W2K just fine. I cloned my original OOBE snapshot and sent him the VDI file - that booted and worked just fine, and he's been using that. I wonder why that would have happened, as it was so weird. Can HFSLIP cause install problems? This happened both when he used the same exact HFSLIP ISO as I had to install, as well as when he compiled using HFSLIP himself locally from a W2K ISO. We both used the same W2K original SP4 ISO, too, so all variables were tightly controlled. And sound stops working for me after an hour or two until a reboot, which is very annoying, though it must be a VM issue. I suspect I'll have fewer issues once it's on actual hardware.

Okay, I admit I don't quite follow but it seems like you know where to go. How did you figure the advapi thing out? Dependency Walker? Interesting A very similar thing just happened in AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). So it doesn't seem to be just the new stuff. I clicked on a link from AIM and it opened up a similar error and also opened the webpage.

So the one referred to by Office will be advapi33 and that will call what? kernel33? We hex-edited MSO.dll so why would we need a special reference to that? Oh, cool! That'll be fun to see. OneNote seems to work for me. I mainly only use it for the screen capture, tool. Short of the Snipping Tool that debuted in Windows Vista, it's the easiest way to take screen shots, since PRINT SCREEN doesn't seem to work in W2K. Here's something else that's been bugging me. Whenever I click on a link, I get this titleless window that opens with this error: The link itself opens normally. There's no error as far as I can tell, apart from the error dialog! The link opens great in Pale Moon, but I always get this. I usually click links in MailNews, but interestingly, I just created link in Word and it does not do that...

Ah, okay. So is the big picture to have a kernel33 that get's called by Office, rather than kernel32?

So basically you don't recommend doing this? What we're trying to do is sadly unachievable?

I'm behind NAT, yeah, so I'm not sure this is much of an issue in that case. So why not add the missing dependencies? That should be easier than conflicting DLL dependencies, right? By the way, this is my first post from Windows 2000 on this site. I got it all set up just right and I even have all my email accounts in MailNews, now. Only thing I can't do on W2K at this point is work with encrypted files, and since this is in a VM right now, sometimes there are audio issues after a while until reboot of the VM.

How does that work? I've been surfing the web in IE6 and New Moon 28 now for a couple days and I've had no issues. Same as before when I was using 2000 vanilla and XP as W2K2. I actually installed MSE on XP, and then later uninstalled and is it didn't even work and just slowed things down. How do you get infected by worms if you don't do anything sketchy? As long as I visit only "known good" websites, it's basically impossible to get a worm, right? I'm sure I could if I did something dumb or tried to, but obviously I'm not. Or am I completely wrong here? I did replace files and it bricked the whole install upon reboot. I don't think no is an option. It doesn't let you proceed otherwise. That's already gone, I already restored the test machine back. In the meantime, I set up my actual machine for use. Connected all my mail accounts to MailNews, set up New Moon, etc. I did not install VB6 since that is known not working at the moment. I did recently find that VirtualBox lets you view all the files on the system without even firing up the system. If it bricks your test VM, too, that should be an easy to check it out. I don't know if it gives dates, though. Interesting. So are we basically screwed or is there any hope? Could we not have advapi33 and hex edit to refer to that? Since we replaced rsaenh, I don't see how that could be the issue.

BSOD on your W2K? Oh, no! Are you planning to fix it! Server 2003 seems about the same as XP with themes disabled and the Windows inExperience patcher 0.72 Do you have any restore points? In general, I avoid antivirus and firewall products on 2000. My rule of thumb is don't do anything stupid and I won't have any issues, and that's worked out so far. A hardware based firewall might make sense in the future but I don't have one yet. VB6 even runs on Win 9x, and should on 2K (it's officially supported). The installer modified the file, though. It should run on XP, but what would the difference in file modifications be on 2000 vs XP? Hope your computer feels better!

@win32 Here's another something weird. I installed Visual Basic 6.0 and that essentially bricked the machine. In addition to installing Java, it replaced a bunch of system files, including crypt32.dll, I noticed. Now what happens it takes forever to startup, and then I can't log on, as it tells me the domain can't be logged onto or something like that. This was the bricked condition that happened in some of the early testing with patching files for Office/Outlook. Considering VB6 is compatible with vanilla W2K, what is this all about??

Hard to say. I had to add a VBScript to Outlook manually expand all the IMAP root folders, since that's the only way to refresh the inbox counts (which is just dumb). When I did that, folders expanded, and I got an infinite message in the lower right hand corner. I forget what it was, but I documented it on the Outlook setup guide. That made Outlook unusable. Launching outlook.exe /safe prevented that, and I could use Outlook as before, but I could not remove the VBScript macro. Visual Basic editor just did not respond. So I basically had to restore back at that point. Also, there were several other reliability problems, namely crashing all the time, I did decide to give MailNews a go. Actually, it's fairly decent, considering that it's not Outlook. It's much more stable than Outlook of course. There are things I prefer about Outlook and things I prefer about MailNews. It is very similar to the Thunderbird that I tried, although it's significantly leaner. The last time I used TB, it used so much memory, maybe 6 or 7 times as much as Outlook. Then again, that might have been because I connected all my accounts to it - but I also did that with Outlook. I only connected 4 accounts to MailNews to test it out, but it's decent. A lot of settings need to be changed, so I took the time to make a setup guide for MailNews on W2K as well. Since neither Outlook 2007 nor MailNews supports Exchange in practice, there's less of a disadvantage to using MailNews than otherwise. I can import my calendar as an ICS in both that auto-refreshes anyways, and I need to import my contacts either way. In this case, although I much prefer the Outlook interface, even 2007, I might use MailNews as a main client because of its stability. I can't put up with all the Outlook crashes. Also, because the VBScript isn't quite working for me (or at least causes another Outlook issue), I can't get updated inbox counts with manually clicking on them all. With 9 accounts, I refuse to do that. I do want it working though, as I could use it just for the calendar maybe. And as an alternative client. Anyways, huge tangents, but good to know. MailNews is much better than TB, even though most of its annoyances are the same since it's basically the same thing. It does have the older feel too. EDIT: I think the version.dll swap MAY have broken something. In all past restores, Outlook would start working again. I did do the version.dll swap, and I just set up an Outlook account, and it prompts for the password forever again. So version.dll didn't fix anything with encryption, and it broke Outlook completely. Well, hopefully that means it won't be too hard to shimmy W2K into doing more things it wasn't designed to do! I'm hopeful there's a fix. I'd say this is really the last major issue left to be tackled. Outlook 2007 is working about as good as it will ever work, or could be expected to work (Outlook 2010 on XP, a support configuration, is more stable or useful, really, apart from a nicer interface). So, as soon as I can edit and save encrypted Word and Excel documents, that means I can pretty much fully switch to W2K. There's nothing else I do on a daily basis that I can't do in W2K; last night, we didn't some testing, and I can even run emulators and VoIP softphones in W2K, which I didn't think would work!

I replaced the version.dll in system32 with the one from Windows XP SP3. Unfortunately, it still gives the same error. I get a Save As dialog first, but when trying to save I get the same message.

Gotcha. So NNN4NT5 is mandatory, but it's already enabled on my system. Interesting. By that, do you mean Administrator/Standard/Restricted? I found it interesting that W2K's "Restricted" is the equivalent of "Standard" in modern versions of Windows. Standard is not really around today, unless maybe that's power user or something. Yeah, I think we're really on the frontier, now. Don't get me wrong, Outlook 2007 on W2K is pretty nice, but Outlook 2010 would be really amazing. Although, right now, my first priority is getting encrypted documents to work correctly. Are you able to edit and save them, or do you also get errors of various kinds? Until then, Office is still only half-functional for me. How might I go about finding the problem? Also, here's a consistent bug I've noticed in Outlook: I double-click an unread message and read it. I close it and then when I double-click a second unread message, Outlook immediately crashes. If I double-click a read message, it doesn't crash, and I can keep going. A bit weird. Unfortunately, they show up in Event Viewer but it's not really helpful: ID: 6, Application Name: Microsoft Office Outlook, Application Version: 12.0.6607.1000, Microsoft Office Version: 12.0.6612.1000. This session lasted 33 seconds with 0 seconds of active time. This session ended with a crash. ID: 6, Application Name: Microsoft Office Outlook, Application Version: 12.0.6607.1000, Microsoft Office Version: 12.0.6612.1000. This session lasted 1468 seconds with 540 seconds of active time. This session ended with a crash. I get something like that every time it crashes. Wait, there's actually useful crash information in the Application Log. Here we go: Faulting application outlook.exe, version 12.0.6607.1000, stamp 4e398dcd, faulting module version.dll, version 5.0.2195.7019, stamp 41de2adb, debug? 0, fault address 0x0000261d. Faulting application outlook.exe, version 12.0.6607.1000, stamp 4e398dcd, faulting module version.dll, version 5.0.2195.7019, stamp 41de2adb, debug? 0, fault address 0x0000261d. Faulting application outlook.exe, version 12.0.6607.1000, stamp 4e398dcd, faulting module version.dll, version 5.0.2195.7019, stamp 41de2adb, debug? 0, fault address 0x0000261d. Faulting application outlook.exe, version 12.0.6607.1000, stamp 4e398dcd, faulting module version.dll, version 5.0.2195.7019, stamp 41de2adb, debug? 0, fault address 0x0000261d. That was 4 different errors, I guess it's the same error causing a crash every time. At least this helps narrow it down! The crashes are not random, but due to one specific cause as indicated by the errors. Unfortunately, no useful information about the encryption errors, I just get: ID: 0, Application Name: Microsoft Office Word, Application Version: 12.0.6612.1000, Microsoft Office Version: 12.0.6612.1000. This session lasted 18 seconds with 0 seconds of active time. This session ended normally. The encryption is a bigger problem, and there's nothing in Event Viewer to narrow it down. Ditto for the error I get in Excel when doing the same thing. EDIT: The following also appeared, but I'm not sure from what: EventType offdiag12, P1 87967bb8-c803-4ab9-b47a-f5f36f6d49ca1e9bb9ec-e88d-48f3-b047-2f30cbdf06fa, P2 NIL, P3 NIL, P4 NIL, P5 NIL, P6 NIL, P7 NIL, P8 NIL, P9 NIL, P10 NIL. And now, something weird has happened where opening Outlook screws up the computer. Can't use it at all, I just get the five fingers mouse over, and if I open an Explorer window and drag it around, it copy cats itself all over the Outlook window each time I stop. If I kill Outlook, this goes away. This happens even after a reboot. Honestly, I'm more annoyed with the encryption errors than with Outlook. I suppose I could use Outlook just for calendars, and use another mail client that natively supports W2K until it's working more smoothly (suggestions?) Does MailNews support Exchange? @win32I wonder if the encryption errors are related to crypt32 or not. Unfortunately, I didn't think to try saving a document even when we had replaced crypt32. So I copied crypt33 to the desktop, renamed it crypt32, and then used replacer to replace the actual crypt32 with the crypt33 file. I know this will break Outlook, but I wanted to narrow down the encryption issues. I rebooted and now in Word, I get the make sure the disk is not full error when trying to save. Excel gives the same error as before. So, no dice. I guess regardless of whether Outlook works or not (which crypt32 is used), you can't edit encrypted files as it is. Thoughts on a solution? Also, as an update, I created a new word doc in 2007 and encrypted it there. Even that will not save. It doesn't matter if the encryption is the old or new kind, it just doesn't work.

@win32 OK, so it was too good to be true, perhaps, and sure enough, I've uncovered a few bugs that have got me stumped again: It seems we only focused on half the puzzle. *Decryption* in Office is working. However, I'm unable to *edit* any encrypted files. When I try editing/saving a Word doc that is encrypted, it whines that it can't save because maybe the disk is full or write protected. This is even when saving to the desktop! In Excel, I get a different error: cannot access the file C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.MSO\3736C000. Makes no sense to me what temp. Internet files have to do with this. How do I know it's encrypted files only? So far, I've had no issues working with files that aren't encrypted. So it seems we're closer than before, but encrypted files are basically read-only at this point, for reasons that don't make sense at all.

@win32Bad news... things were working fine... now all of a sudden, I get the dread "CRYPT32 incompatible error" again... I haven't changed anything! It started with TCP/IP errors, nothing was connected, and when I logged into a new account, that's what I got. Somewhere along the way, things broke... I think time took it's toll, and maybe Windows internally did something weird as it was doing its usual Windows stuff. Does your Outlook still work? What if you try to add a second account? If I restore back to right when I did the restore, it works. But who knows where it went wrong. Somewhere, Outlook went willy nilly off the rails again. Once I restored, I could connect a Gmail and a Yandex account. I've spent some time working in Outlook 2007 now and changing settings. Not yet to the actual sending/receiving part yet. Conversation view, like in 2003, is pretty much broken/nonexistent, as that didn't come until 2010. Just out of curiosity, how hard would it to be to install Outlook 2010 *standalone* on W2K? I'm perfectly happy with the rest of the Office programs, and 2007 is a bit better than 2003, for sure, but I'd be interested to see if that would work/is even possible. Especially since XP supports both, so I'm not sure why KernelEx supports 2007 but not 2010. Also, in Outlook 2007, does the Calibri font work for you? Mine looks more like 2003 than the 2010 interface in terms of font. This was on XP, so it looks all nice: Whereas on Windows 2000, Outlook 2007 just looks so much more ancient. Is this possibly because W2K doesn't have the "round font edges" setting? **EDIT:** Fixed - go to Effects and click "Smooth edges of screen fonts". Everything looks *much* nicer now! Edit 3 hours later: I've been using Outlook 2007 quite a bit now and it's been mostly working so far. Several crashes, but not enough that it's unusable. It's not really any less stable than Outlook 2010 on Windows XP, and that was an officially supported configuration by Microsoft, so I'd say the outcome has been quite good so far.