eidenk

It's worth knowing as well that the above described way extensions associations and icons are managed can be overriden in at least two different ways. This means that you can see the entries in the registry as I have described them above but it is not what you get in explorer. It's quite unusual but it happens from time to time. One applies only to icons and the other to extension associations as well. They are : 1) Icon handlers shell extensions. Those will be found in a shellex/iconhandler subkey in one of those three places : 1) under the file extension key itself, 2) under the filetype key the file extension key refers to, or 3) under the All Files key which is HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*. 2) File extensions entries in HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts or HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts. No icons or associations will be specified there but only an executable name. If this executable name has a subkey under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\CLASSES\Applications key and that this subkey contains a valid \Shell\....\Command and DefaultIcon subkey, those will override the standard command and icon for a given filetype. In addition, but I don't know if this applies to NT systems but I think it does for 9x ones, entries in the win.ini file in the windows folder under [Extension] will also override the standard registry associations.

There is no stupidity here just Microsoft's greed at work IMO. When you've got 80 billion dollars in the pocket like Bill Gates has you can push many levers and enforce many such diktats. Seems obvious to me.

which registry will i have to change?????? Under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT look for the file extension key, .xxx. for example. Then look at the default data on the other pane and you will read something like xxxfile for example. Then, still under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT look for the key that has this data name. Under that second key you'll find a default icon subkey. That's where it is. Note that the default icon subkey can also be located under the first key but usually it is under the second one so that different file extensions can have the same commands and icon. Any program you install may change the default data for the file extensions it will handle and consequently the location of the default icon key(s) of those extensions.

Ur sure ?

In the registry under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\Open you'll find the command to open drives and folders.

I thought about it a bit more as you said you had an error message saying that VFAT could not be loaded. That is very early in the boot process and I am not sure whether this takes place before or after scanreg. (If you want to prevent scanreg to run at all you must also disble the backup option btw.) Also it does appear that VFAT (which is part of vmm32.vxd) is not loaded from the registry : And here is a page about being unable to load VFAT that you may want to check albeit nothing seems to apply to your case : http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...b;EN-US;q139063 Puzzling as the title of the thread says.

Here you go http://rapidshare.com/files/57671848/RegDoc.7z.html

Well I have run Google translate on all the pages and did download them ater that. I can archive all that and upload it if you want. Of course it is not a real translation. I haven't even removed the junk from it but it might save you a bit of time. Let me know if you want them.

Unbelieveable that winzip does not support 7z with the price it costs really You'll need 7-Zip or another archiver supporting this format, which means almost all those who don't cost any money. MS says about Win 98 registry : So it seems you are right about the unlimited size of it. As you said you have ample memory and disk space, what you suggest above should not be a problem. As the japanese guy is adamant that scanreg can't optimize a registry bigger than 8MB, it might be worth trying to boot with the optimize option of scanreg disabled as the entire process might just been choking on that eventually. You would just need to edit the scanreg.ini file in your windows dir and set the optimize value to 0, and see how it fares like that. The network adapter thing seems bizarre though. I cannot make much sense of it. Also, have you thought about uninstalling or disabling something in Norton in case it also touches the registry at startup which I would guess it might be doing ?

I have 16 programs running at startup, and believe it or not, I have no stability issues. And they run in the background all the time providing many enhancements to Windows. You can see, and edit/remove if desired, most of these program startups, in the following Win 98 SE/ME registry keys: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunServices Thanks fastlanephil but those proggies are not there against my will. I want them all to run. BTW there are more, or rather can be, more run keys than that, Run, RunOnce, RunServices, RunServicesOnce, RunOnceEx both in HKLM and HKCU, and many other startup vectors for non .exe files.

So guys, BenoitRen and Andrew T., there is no topic about all what is needed to install to keep a 95 system as up to date as possible, which I believe is quite different than for 98/ME. Would you be willing to create one as you seem to be two expert users of that OS ?

I am on WinMe and if I was on 98 I would probably have bumped in similar issues as the cumulated size of my classes.dat and system.dat is above 13MB. The biggest eaters in terms of size seem to be DirectX and the dotnet runtimes with their huge amount of CLSIDs keys. I think I have read about the registry files having a maximum size on Win9x but I cannot find anything about it now. What seems certain anyway is that scanreg is unable to compact registry files which are above 8MB. IMO the best doc about the win9x registry is in japanese : http://www.haltz.com/rgstry2/index.htm There is one page in english though but for the rest you'll need to use babelfish or google translate. He details several different methods for compacting the registry and there is alot about the registry stucture. This guy wrote a registry compactor, RegCon which is the only one that does actually work amongst the many claiming to to do that and that I have tried. He also wrote a registry analyzer, Registrip, which has no equivalent and which displays charts and pies about registry occupation (used space, empty space, dead gaps). I have translated those two interesting freebies some time ago, the first partially and the second more completely. I have uploaded those translated apps on Rapidshare in case you find them useful to troubleshoot or circumvent your issue : http://rapidshare.com/files/57327311/RegUtils.7z.html There is a couple of other utils you might find useful to hunt for stuff to delete from the registry : Registry Space Profiler : http://www.tliquest.net/software/rsp/ and Pluto : http://sourceforge.net/projects/pluto

the question now is ... anyone know of a program that can edit NE files? What do you want to edit in win95bb.dll ? Text is in win95bb.ini and the bitmap images are inside the precopy folder as .bin files. Replace the text and images to some of your liking that have the same size and color depth and you'll be done probably. NE resources can be edited with MSVC but there is little you can do to edit the compiled code displaying all those external resources unless you are a very good hacker maybe. Why don't you post this in the Win 98 forum btw ?

I have 16 programs running at startup, and believe it or not, I have no stability issues. And they run in the background all the time providing many enhancements to Windows.

It does not run in a MS-DOS prompt. As jaclaz just said, it is a 32bit console app and you'll see that if you drag a shortcut from it, it will be a windows shortcut and not an MS-DOS one.

There is something wrong with your system then, cos everyone else seem to be able to run them.

Have a look at this topic maybe van : http://www.msfn.org/board/QEMU_98_ME_dummies_t61389.html A half baked and probably outdated tut I wrote about Qemu some time ago. win9x runs nicely under win9x with it.

Is this not a generic Windows problem that makes that the ratio used/empty is often misreported on the drive property sheets ? I have got this problem often as well and the way to fix it (temporarily) is to run scandisk or defrag (or one of their clones) on the drives. I think this problem predates the installation of moded esdi_506.pdr on my machine and that it is related to how free space is calculated on FAT32. Some babble from wikipedia : When you look at a drive property sheet, you can see that the FAT is not scanned for making a calculation of free space. Certainly there is a place where this free space value is stored, and incremented after each relevant operation (occupy or free clusters) but this incrementation suffers from a bug apparently. And the problem is not new as you can see in this thread on annoyances.org : http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/win2000/t1005768629 I think there is nothing to worry about.

No it doesn't, I know. Look in this thread for for several hacked versions of Google Earth who do work on Win98/ME.

If your BIOS does not support LBA48 now, it still won't with the LLXX patch.

Thanks, I ignored that. Let us hope it is more reliable with MS files than with Exe Explorer itself, as I would not think it has been compiled the 19/06/1992.

You should make an effort when you post questions really. Well if you want to change filetypes icons in an unnatended CD I guess you must include the new icons you want and a registry file containing their paths. Read the WAssociate doc, it'll get you acquainted as to how file extensions (and their icons) are managed in Windows. Without gaining understanding about that, it'll be very hard if not impossible to manage what you want to do. As well it is a better/faster tool than Regedit to find where the icons locations are specified. I forgot to mention that it is simply a specialized registry editor dealing only with the context menu and that you can copy the tree views to text files in regedit format where you will be able to read where the extensions and their icons are located in the registry (locations which may vary according to your setup). Still the best tool I know to prepare for the replacing of filetypes icons in an unattended CD.

OK Understood. Best tool for doing that IMO is WAssociate, a context menu management utility. Once you have installed it, you can create a shortcut to it in the sendto folder (I am not sure it does it itself) and after that you can just right-click on any file and send it to that application. You'll see there is an icon button on it's GUI, click on it and browse to the new icon of your choice for the filetype you edit. After doing that you may need to refresh the icons with an extra tool to see immediately the change in explorer. That's the easier/fastest way to do it. But you can also go in Control Panel / Folder Options / File Types in Windows and select an extension, click on the Advanced tab and change the icon. (That's on WinME, it may differ a bit on the OS you have) Does this answer your question ?

Well no they don't as I have just tried it with 0 bytes text files renamed to those dlls and the installer fails. Extract of the dxerror.log : What I did to actually install DX9 was to extract those files from the cabs and put them in the unpacked DX setup folder.

There is probably a monthly computer fair in Southport where you should find some.