eidenk

Can't you just rewrite a standard boot sector with fdisk (or the equivalent tool in XP as I am on ME and it's fdisk I would use to make the drive bootable again) ? Or put your drive as slave on another computer and just copy the files you want to keep. If it's only the boot sector that is damaged there is no need for file recovery programs IMO.

What about one for WinME also, LLX ?

This shouldn't be in the list as it is not exactly a registry cleaner but rather a COM manager and it's not garbage IMO.Check also COMView at http://www.japheth.de/ for an even better tool in the same category. Yes it does have a registry cleaner under Tools/Registry Cleanup and it is still one of the best free maintenance tools IMO.

Frankly, if you want my opinion zip folders is nor worth it. You'd rather install IzArc for example to handle archives. It will handle most of them, the list is long, and also you'll be able to create archives which you can't do with zip folders.

Hi erpdude, I don't know too much what to respond as I have never installed that Mozart stuff he speaks about. One thing is sure, if Eck wants to know what screws his system when installing Mozart without SFP he should monitor the install with InstallWatch, making sure to do a full system scan. What may happen is that this Mozart stuff downgrades some system files (or worst even upgrades some to XP only ones) and hence if SFP is disabled, it might indeed create some big problems that not even a reinstall of the OS on top of itself may solve in the latter case. But IMO you never need to format unless the FAT is screwed which I doubt is the case after installing a software. As for improvements of ME over 98, certainly SFP comes handy for some people, but it is not the only improvement. Generic USB mass storage drivers and the enhanced search applet as well as the faster boot and enhanced stabilty in low resources conditions are for me the top ones. The rest I can do without easily. Dunno if this answers your question, erpdude.

I don't think so but I am not 100% sure. I haven't looked in the CD as I don't know where it is ATM but it is not in the install cabs that are on my disk. It is a new file of the Active Accessibility component apparently so I guess it should be included in the service pack even if it's not originally in WinME as Active Accesssibility is part of WinME (Oleacc.dll being present in the install cabs for example).

I am not much a specialist in that but I think you can simply rename the one you like as logo.sys and dump it in the windows directory. There are some logo managers as well. Desktop Architect for example (free) but also others. I think some are listed on MDGx's page.

You can try LogoView. It's japanese but it's easy to understand. http://my.vector.co.jp/servlet/System.File...go/logov130.zip

You forgot something guys : solid archive option. That's where you gonna get the best results, especially if you compress loads of similar files in the same archive.

Well I don't know if the issues are related. Anyway shelliconcache should be created during normal shutdown (unless I am doing a mistake saying that but I don't think so) Get X-Setup Pro 6.6 (last free version). There is an option (in Appearance/Explorer/Settings) to enable/disable shared resources overlay. There is another option (in Apperance/Interface/Icons) to set the size of the shelliconcache. Maybe yours is set to zero which would explain why the file is not created. They say you can set it up to 8000 (icons) but in my experience the max that can be obtained on a 9x system is 4092. You said it happened suddenly but there is always a reason (installing new software, etc...) for such things to happen.

Have you shut down windows normally as I suggested you ? The shelliconcache file is created if it does not exist (or updated if it does already exist) only during the normal shutdown procedure. During startup, Windows loads the content of this file into memory. The main benefit of this file is that it will speed up a little bit the boot process as the icons on your desktop and your taskbars (as well as others) will be cached in this file and windows will have to access only that single file one time during boot for displaying them all instead of having to parse the drives to extract those icons from several different files. When you use TweakUI (or other similar utils) to rebuild the Iconcache, it happens only in the memory of the computer. It just makes the shelliconcache area of the memory empty.

If you shut down Windows normally you should have one again.

It comes from installing MSBackup very probably.

It's more or less the same as in XP. You should just be able to plug your USB image acquisition device and Windows should recognize it automatically without needing to install specific drivers for those devices. It's just a few files : stimon.exe, stimon.dll and all the WIAsomething.dll I have removed that component from my system because I found it to interfere negatively with the proper operation of the OS. Basically stimon.exe would get frequently loaded as a background task for no apparent reason and would considerably slow down the OS from those moments on and after a while I got fed up to constantly have to kill that task. Maybe the reason was because I have an old scanner that's always plugged on the serial port. It would be interesting to know if other ME users with a different hardware setup are experiencing problems with this component.

In your IE options you can move the TIF folder to anywhere you want. If you also want to move your history and cookies folders you'll need an utility such as X-Setup or edit the registry by hand.

Yes it is entirely removed. I have used Beta10 Oppcom for Windows ME.http://www.beta10.com/oppcomme.htm Protected files are listed in Filelist.xml I think. http://www.snapfiles.com/get/xmlnotepad.html

http://www.pegtop.net/start/

I don't use system restore and system file protection on my ME system so I can't say too much but I am sure the original individual installers don't need an additional particular procedure such as killing stmgr.exe to properly install. I have not tested the pack yet but I will in Qemu sometimes later or tomorrow. I'll also try to install normal individual updates as to try to see what happens with regards to SFP. I have found a handy new application launcher for USB keys called Pstart with which I am going to move a set of diagnostic and monitoring utilities in the emulated OS. PS : Off-topic : For some reason I can't manage to view or use forum properly with either IE5.5 or Opera since the latest maintenance but K-meleon works fine.

XP SP2 don't allow for disabling WFP with the registry only anymore. Files must be hexed AFAIK. I have seen some tuts here and there.

You don't need an extension for doing this. Editing the registry is enough : REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\New Window] [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\New Window\Command] @="explorer.exe %1" That's for exploring folders as root from the context menu if anyone's interested : REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\rootexplore] @="&Root Explore" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\rootexplore\command] @="Explorer.exe /e,/root,/idlist,%I"

Get your hands on InstallWatch Pro 2.5c : http://www.epsilonsquared.com/installwatch.htm Some discussion and advanced tips here : http://www.geocities.com/floydian_99/poormantripwire.html

Maybe Windows 2000 SP4 is finally a good OS (stable and everything such as large hard drives support introduced only in SP3) but not Windows 2000. It has benefited from 4 massive service packs in 4 years to give it stability while the latest 9x declination, Windows ME, published the same year as Windows 2000 benefited from none at all which is scandalous especially as far as support for 128GB+ drives is concerned. It's just all a matter of policy.

It seems there is an unofficial patch in circulation already : http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=999 http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=1010 Windows Metafiles or .wmf are vector graphic images. It's not a mime type on my PC but it could be on another one I believe. PS : It's not registered as mime type but IE still displays WMF files on my system. You can get plenty here for example : http://www.kamsart.com/ PS2 : It is registered on my system as mime type (image/x-wmf), just only the content type flag does not exist for some reason on the .wmf CLASSES key, and it is handled by MSHTML.DLL apparently through the {607fd4e8-0a03-11d1-ab1d-00c04fc9b304} CLSID key (CoICOFilter Class) refered to by CLASSES\MIME\Database\Content Type\image/x-wmf.

Winamp won't play realmedia proper I think. My advice is to leave Real Player in place, install the realmedia splitter for DirectShow and then use any DS based player to view your files. There are tons of them. Some of the best (and free) are Media Player Classic and BSPlayer IMO. The latest I have discovered and that is very good is KMPlayer. You might want to try it as it includes several (many) splitters, including the realmedia and Quicktime ones, it can use in internal mode apparently without registering them to the system. http://www.kmplayer.com/down/kmp.zip

You must do it by hand. There is no app I am aware of that does this. Export the relevant registry key to a reg file. Reorder the items in a text editor as you want them to appear in the context menu. Then delete the key and import the modified registry file and you'll be done. Clear enough ?