gosh

do basic troubleshooting, disable any plugins in wmp, tell us what process is using the cpu, does it happen in safe mode? -gosh

you could go into device manager and disable devices. since i assume this is a clean install, it's probably hardware, specially drivers. simply go into devman and disable everything under sound, modems, nic's, things like that. if that works you just need to update the driver. you might need that 98 shutdown update. use msconfig too. -gosh

I didnt read anything in this thread, but ill say this. You can upgrade from win98 original to win98se without any problems. 98se originally was just going to be a service pack anyway, not a whole new os. when 98se came out for the first year you could buy a 98se upgrade cd for only $20 that only upgraded 98 to 98se. the cab files for 98se retail and oem are exactly the same - the only thing different is the setup.exe file. so if you had the win98se .cab files, you could simply find a setup.exe for the retail and use a retail cd and it'll install fine. you dont need the full version to upgrade 98 to 98se, however you cant use an oem cd because by design, oem cd's are only used for clean installs. i believe you can bypass that with a hidden switch for setup.exe. look around and youll find what i mean... -gosh

the registery key it looks at his hklm\software\microsoft\windows\current version\uninstall. so if that's blank it sounds like you formatted or accidently did a clean install or you did something youre not telling us. that window just doesnt randomly go blank, you have to do something -gosh

as long as you havent rebooted you can use last known good, you can also use safe mode, and of course you can use driver rollback if this is updated software. simply go into device manager, double click on device, and select option for rollback. basic troubleshooting applies -gosh

Anyone in tech support will tell you one thing: People want the best product, but they dont want to pay for it. so companies end up lying, saying you get great service, when you don't. The problem is people dont want to pay for support. they want something from nothing, that's not how the world works. if you want great support then pay for it. -gosh

what's event viewer say? What's unique to the 3rd connection the other 2 connections dont have? -gosh

power users already by default can load/unload drivers, although i believe these have to be digitally signed and inbox drivers. You configure windows to install files that arent digitally signed, or of course you could install the drivers yourself on the pc, then i believe the other user will be able to install the drivers since there already on the pc -gosh

there's a diff version of pidgen.dll for each version. a simple way to see if english key would work in foreign version is check to see file size of pidgen.dll -gosh

it sounds like there's just a new connection in your network connections window, if that's the case then just right click on it and delete it. sometimes xp will find phantom connections. -gosh

to enable cleartype you need to reinstall xp, otherwise i would think that's a driver issue with your display driver. -gosh

at startup press f8 and chose use last known good config, that'll fix it. that probably modifies the services -gosh

what you need to do is in my computer properties uncheck the option to auto restart. eventvwr.msc will have the error listed under application. then post the error for more help, or search the error at support.microsoft.com/support -gosh

you can configure xp to auto dial by checking the box to automatically connect in inet options. this way anytime an app requests internet access xp will auto connect you. if you are using ics there's a setting to auto connect the host when a client wants to surf the web. -gosh

yes control runs any control panel applet, such as 'control sysdm.cpl. In win9x you actually had to specify the control part, but in xp you don't. If you look at the HKCR of .cpl you'll see what command it uses when it runs .cpl files. -gosh

Both my computers dont meet the min req on 512 MB ram. This was unacceptable to me, there has to be an easy way around that. After 2 hours of doing various things, i got vista installed on my pc with 256 MB Ram. My computer with 128 MB pc133 ram blue screened, but it did file copy To bypass all the vista compliance checks type: setup.exe /nosyscheck This will bypass the hardware and software checks. On my pc with 256 MB ram it runs fun. And btw: looking at the source and the log files it appears the min ram is actually 387 MB Ram, not 512. I found this out on my own without any inet access or any help, so sorry if this has already been posted/discovered. There's a bunch of hidden switches in winsetup.dll ~gosh

hey this is gosh...again...i used to post to this site a long time ago...i was wondering: where is the greatest need now? What kind of things would people like to see? I'm thinking of making my own website but that'll take awhile. -gosh