eidenk

The simplest of system backup is copying all your files onto another disk from within windows with explorer.

In which way exactly ?

Who f***ing cares ?

There should not be any difference whether one is on 98SE, ME, 98SE2ME or whatever pack or version of IE. This explorer freeze bug is not one that forces you to reboot. It can be recovered from easily with the triple finger salute. When you freeze, do Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Choose to end the explorer task. This will pop the shutdown menu. Cancel it. Wait a few seconds or redo the operation a second time and soon a message box will appear, telling you that explorer is not responding. Choose to end the task. Explorer will then be terminated and will restart automatically. You should be back on a fully functional desktop and explorer. There is a way of doing the equivalent of this with just one click on the middle mouse button if you are willing to run Cool Mouse 96 as a background task and configure it so that it launches, for example, Nirsoft's explorestart. Whenever you get that freeze you can then move your mouse cursor to where your taskbar is and then click on your middle mouse button. In one second you'll be back on your feet.

Glad you got it right. Unfortunately I can't help with the autopatcher because I have never used it.

For me the main point of not uninstalling/removing this component is that there is no other shell that offers so much conveniences/functionality to the desktop. I have toolbars on three sides of the screen. 12 in all in addition to the quicklaunch bar and despite it is not perfect, the functionality is unparalleled IMO.

I can confirm the /NOLBA switch to work here. Best is to create a shortcut to Speed Disk with that argument. It is in the NU readme.txt anyway. As always if unsure, first test on disks whose data you can afford to lose. If you just want to use the Norton 2000 diskutils (Image, Disk Doctor and Speed Disk) and not have the rest of it installed, do as follows : Install NU. Then grab those files wherever they are on your disk : IMAGE32.EXE IMAGE32.HLP N32DLIST.DLL N32DLSTU.DLL N32USERL.DLL NDD32.EXE NDD32.HLP NDDENG.DLL NUABOUT.DLL NUMISC.DLL NUSPLASH.DLL S32DMAPL.DLL S32EVNT1.DLL S32FATL.DLL S32GUIL.DLL S32KRNLL.DLL S32MAILL.DLL S32NPTL.DLL S32STAT.DLL S32UTILL.DLL SD32.EXE SD32.HLP SD32ENG.DLL SD32VXD.VXD SYMKRNLL.DLL SYMKRNLL.VXD TKKE16L.DLL TKKE32L.DLL Grab the NU readme.txt as well as there is good info in it. Put those files in a folder of your choice and uninstall NU. Then merge this reg file to your registry : REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Symantec] "UserFrameSize"="100663296" That's all you need. Nothing from Norton will run as background service, task or dll and the disk utilities are fully functionnal. And you can delete the bitmap in NUSPLASH.DLL with Reshacker if you don't want to see the splashscreen. I did not actually proceed like that. I did install NU on an OS in a virtual machine and I have transplanted the above onto my real system. You can also grab the DOS files if you want, albeit I can't vouch for them as I haven't tested them. They are : DISKEDIT.EXE DISKEDIT.HLP NDD.EXE UNERASE.EXE UNFORMAT.EXE

I have just read about computer identification by TCP/IP stack fingerprinting. Quite interesting and relevant to this thread maybe. http://insecure.org/nmap/osdetect/ http://www.usenix.org/publications/library...art/smart_html/ http://www.securiteam.com/tools/5MP052KI0A.html

Hi, nice job and nice app if it wasn't for 1) the political propaganda that is contained in it, 2) it's spyware aspect. Unlike what you say it can be run from anywhere, the res folder does not need to be copied in the appdata folders and the included registry file appears useless.

Oh right, there has been two fixes on 98SE and only the first of those has been made for ME. I hadn't read properly and got confused by the fact that Rick Chauvin and myself seem to report the same behaviour. I confirm that IE 5.5 is affected by the explorer freeze bug as I am using IE5.5. For that reason I always found weird reports of people saying that a transplant of IE5.5 files into a IE6 installation was fixing the problem. I usually move lots of files around and that freeze is so annoying that I have would have probably moved to another platform if I hadn't devised a satisfactory workaround/fix to that problem several years ago.

I have looked much more thoroughly in the screensaveer prob I have and I correct errors in reporting : Opengl screensavers are using opengl whether they crash or not. (I must have compared the container application with the screensaver by mistake in my first test) All opengl screensavers I have tested are affected similarly. They crash according to the length of their name/path. Example : If I put an opengl screensaver in the root drive and give it a name of 1 or 2 characters long it does not crash. It then crashes if it has a name that is 3 or 4 characters long. Does not crash if the name is 5 or 6 characters long. Crashes if the name is 7 or 8 characters long. Does not crash if the name is 9 or 10 characters long. Crashes if the name is 11 or 12 characters long. Etc... along that progression. The Adobe Type Manager has nothing to do with the problem as I have uninstalled it and the problem persist. Dr Watson crash logs seem to indicate it is nvopengl that could be responsible. (I have the latest nVidia display drivers which have been reinstalled) No application using opengl seems affected besides screensavers. Anyway any opengl ss that crashes on me can be fixed by either adding or removing 1 or 2 characters from it's name so that it falls at a proper place in the above progression. Sorry Evanhoe to go off-topic in your thread.

I beg your pardon but I don't quite fully understand what you are saying. What is the ShellME fix that I have downloaded from MDGx then ?

Lol, believe it or not I had sometimes asked myself the same question about you. You are saying it, SATA or IDE HDDs are the same internally. Their read/write speed is limited by their internal mechanical characteristics. That's where the speed bottleneck currently is. Today the only interest of SATA lies in the capability it offers to configure drives in various types of RAID arrays. It allows you to use several drives as if it was one drive only. In one type of config you can write the same data to several drive. That's used by corps or peeps that fear data loss. In another type of config you can use several drives as it was one, data being equally splitted between the disks by the controller. This offers evidently read/write speed benefits. But that's just because you make one logical drive from several physical ones. You can't transfer data at 1.5GB/s between your two Maxtors because you plug them on a SATA adapter card. You'll get 40MB/s at most which is what current 7200 rpm drives can deliver in the best conditions to my observation. Anyway there is no ultimate system without at least 4 fat HHDs.

In my recent experience, it seems they have abandoned WU for XPSP2 as well. Could not get anything at all out of it. Catastrophic man ! (I'll post some screenshots of all the errors and IE crashes I got on that site with a fresh XPSP2 install some day if I can be arsed to upload them.) So I can just guess what WU for 98SE/ME might be at the moment, lol.

Can you not install it afresh and not do an upgrade ?

Not to speak about DOS.

Not sure it is the Adobe Type Manager the problem, but I don't see what else it could be. I haven't tried to remove it yet. If it's that, no one is going to fix it I guess. And not sure it would happen on any system as the video drivers might also come into the mix, nvopengl (nVidia) being also loaded. As for the screensaver itself, using or not using opengl, depending on how it is named, it has been quite a surprise. I guess the ss checks it's own name before choosing a rendering mode. When I said unofficial patches I meant patched files, not updated files gathered in official updates for other oses, etc... and put together by MDGx or others. Those ones I install most if not all of them. And, like many I think, I don't run KB891711 nor any of its unofficial variants. Maybe that's as risky as having casual sex with total strangers without a condom. Anyway no browser or operating system is immune from a nasty zero day exploit, so... I had ShellMe by anonymous but I removed it because, albeit it protects from the explorer copy freeze in most circumstances, it appears it has some side effects I do not like.

The COA IMO as there is the product key (or serial number) printed on it.

I think I found out what the problem is : This file apparently uses opengl when it has it's original filename and does not use opengl when it has another filename. This I observed by loading this screensaver in an application that runs screensavers in a window and looking at the loaded modules with a process viewer. When it has it's original filename (with a space) it loads the opengl subsystem and crash. When the filename is modified it does not load opengl and does not crash. It turns out that all the third party opengl screensavers I have are also crashing, but those ones whatever the filename is. As for why my opengl ss are all crashing, it is probably because there is an incompatibility with the Universal Adobe Postscript Printer driver I have recently installed. According to Dr Watson, this driver patches GDI.exe in memory. I still have to uninstall this driver to confirm that. I have no unofficial patches installed besides LLXX's esdi_506.pdr.

Eck, I certainly not deserve the label of guru which I believe some other desserve far more than I do. Thanks for the compliment anyway. Maybe you are a better guru than me so I submit a little problem I have at the moment and that eludes me quite badly : The 3D Maze screensaver crashes in kernel32.dll. If I remove the space in it's name, it does not crash anymore. It should work the same whatever the name is. Any idea ?

Windows 98SE does not copy the install cabs on the HDD as far as I know (WinME does). They are on the Install CD (in the win98 folder on my 98SE CDs) but you can copy that folder onto your HDD if you want to. The benefits of doing so are that you don't need the CD if you (or the system) want to extract a file from them and that a reinstall is much faster from the HDD than from the CD. Of course it uses some disk space. As you've got NDN, you could use it now under windows for searching in which cab is this setupx.dll and extract it to the system dir with it. Navigate with NDN to the directory where your install cabs are. Once you are there, use the search function : File/Find or alt+F7, fill the filemask field with the filename, tick the "search in archives" option, press enter and the file will soon be displayed if it is in one of the cabs. Then copy it wherever you want (File/Copy or F5). Let me know if you have problems with that.

Van, when you reinstall Windows on top itself, some files are overwritten with the original ones even if newer files are present but some other are not and that might be the case with setupx.dll or eventually another dll it works with. Try to extract it from your cabs and copy it into the system folder. It *might* solve your problem. And don't forget to get NDN. Put the NDN folder in the root dir so if you have a similar problem again, you just need to boot into DOS, either from the HDD or from your Startup floppy (create one if haven't done so) and type C:\ndn\ndn and press enter to have a very handy file manager to do anything you need without needing to type anything complicated. Eck, I hate installing even fancy new oses, it is no fun for me. I prefer installing lots of software. Fortunately, even though you live in great poverty, you can still afford to swap hardware and purchase Vista to entertain yourself. Give us your verdict about it if have got some time some day.

How often do you reinstall, Eck ? More I read you more I get the feeling you need to reinstall very often.

If you don't use CPU intensive apps, indeed machines two or three year old (above 2Ghz) are ideal as the OS (WinME in my case) remains fast and crispy no matter how much you load it with addons and shell extensions etc... But if you encode videos, render fractals or 3D images, play virtual instruments for example, you naturally want more CPU speed. With the fastest current chips I could more than double the "CPU speed" I currently have, meaning I could play twice as many virtual instruments simultaneously, etc...

Soporific, Your undo file does not restore the original values of certain keys/values you modify : [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings] @="" "MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server"=dword:00000008 "MaxConnectionsPerServer"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD\MSTCP] @="" "DefaultRcvWindow"="15246" "SackOpts"="1" "DefaultTTL"="128" You should provide a backup for those two keys IMO.