Dave-H

Thanks yes, I already have this installed and it will do the job if there's no way of displaying the list in a browser once the MS sites are gone.

Game over I think, it doesn't get better than this! Neneh Cherry onstage at the Glastonbury Festival after the laptop running her background video apparently crashed!

One point that I'm now wondering about. Is there any way of saving one's update history permanently so it can be displayed in the future? I seem to remember that when the Windows 98 version of Windows Update was taken offline, it became impossible to see your Windows 98 update history as it was necessary to load the site to be able to see it. I'm assuming that this is will be the same with the present Windows Update and Microsoft Update sites. Once they will no longer load in Internet Explorer, it will be impossible to see your update history, even though the necessary files are still on the computer. Anyone got any ideas about how to easily archive this in a future-readable format before it's too late?

I would imagine most registry entries with incorrect syntax would just be ignored. If the format of the entry was completely wrong, it wouldn't even get entered. If everything is working fine, I wouldn't worry about it.

Any thoughts on this @jumper?

AFAIK KB4462223 is the last broken update which has to be left uninstalled for Office 2010 to carry on working on XP. All others are either safe to install, or have been superseded by KB4462223, which replaces the last working MSO.DLL (14.0.7214.5000) with an incompatible version.. KB2553347 seems to be a very old update from 2015, so I doubt it would have any relevance now.

Also, 4.5.2016.21 seems to cause some issues with the Office 2007 Compatibility Pack on Windows 98. After replacing the KernelEx files (including core.20i renamed to core.ini, which I assume is correct) the converters didn't work, saying they were "pre-release versions". I tried different KernelEx modes on the various files, but to no avail. Returning to the 4.5.2016.19/20 files made everything come good. There's a long thread about this, the relevant section is around here! The Compatibility Pack had suddenly stopped working for me and it took me ages to discover that it was updating KernelEx which had caused the problem!

Office 2010 wouldn't activate online for me on Windows XP, it also rather worryingly said that telephone activation was no longer available! Fortunately when I tried it did actually work, although I had to go through the tedious business of inputting eight six number blocks of the installation ID and getting back eight six number activation code blocks to put in! Still, at least that does still work and you can activate it on XP. Just to add insult to injury, I had to do it all over again when I changed my motherboard too, presumably because it was considered to be a different computer!

Yes, that's the guy! I'll need to fire up my netbook tomorrow, which also has Office XP and Compatibility Pack installed on Windows XP and Windows 8.1, to see if it's working there. EDIT: Yes, now checked and the Office Assistant does work fine on the Office XP installation on Windows XP on my netbook. Not on the Windows 98 installation though.

Just as a probably off-topic aside, does your Office Assistant work? If I try to invoke it, I just get this - I don't think it's ever worked since I installed Office XP on Windows 98. I can't actually remember if it worked when it was installed on Windows XP, I assume yes. It was installed as part of the Office XP installation on Windows 98.

Thanks, I have Filemon and Regmon already installed, so I'll try to do some comparisons.

Our posts crossed! Yes, from what you say it looks as if the msi/cab combination does install without modification, even though the packaged file doesn't, which is strange but good of course.

Well I tried that, and it didn't work, whatever KernelEx mode I used on FileFormatConverters.exe it either said it needed a later OS, or it failed, just putting up a "The installation of this package failed" message, with no clue as to why it had failed, and I couldn't find any logs saying why either. I then tried extracting the files from FileFormatConverters.exe with Universal Extractor, and what's in there is actually the same files I've been using for my installs, an msi file and a cab file! It may be that the msi file I've been using has been hacked to get around the OS version check, but the files do seem to be exactly the same size. So, still a bit of a mystery why the explorer conversion routine isn't doing quite what it should do. It does actually work, I've successfully converted a doc file to a docx file with it, it just won't offer conversion in the opposite direction!

Just wondering why what is presumably the core.ini file is called core.20i instead of core.ini?

I didn't install it using FileFormatConverters.exe, I used an MSI installer file. I can give that a try though.

Pretty sure all the files I've tried it with are genuine .docx files. They are files that have generally been sent to me as e-mail attachments by people with later versions of Word. I've tried many of them, and they all do the same thing. The one I posted as an example I opened with 7-zip and if showed the same as your file except for the addition of a "customXml" folder. I don't know if that is significant.

Your original thread is only five threads below this one! I'd already asked the mods to move it to the New Moon thread (very top of the board) because that's where it (and this one) should be.

Well I finally killed ctfmon.exe using a utility I found here. It doesn't actually remove it, it deactivates it by substituting a dummy version. Seems to do the job anyway, it no longer shows as running! This is what I'm seeing when I use the explorer interface on a .docx file. As you can see, there is no option to save as a .doc. Also note that it's offering to save as the DOS filename, not the long filename. Very strange, as yours obviously works fine!

Now that's just showing off!

Hmm, this is all coming back to me! I went to try and get rid of ctfmon.exe, and found that in the Office XP setup, "Alternative User Input" wasn't installed in the first place, and I'm pretty certain that it never has been, as it's not something I would ever need. So it's showing as unavailable already, but ctfmon.exe is still there and running! I seem to remember trying to get rid of it when I had Office XP installed on Windows XP, and I never managed to get rid of it then! Is it something to do with search that it's also needed for, or am I mis-remembering? Was it installed with the Compatibility Pack? I need to do some more research!

I do agree about security suites like Avast not being great for low resource and/or low powered machines. I put it on the XP side of my netbook to replace MSE, and it did cause some problems. Now I have Malwarebytes on it, and it's much better, but you have to pay for that to get real time scanning.

Going off-topic, but Grub4DOS bootloader was recommended to me a few years ago as a possible answer to adding Windows 10 to the Windows 98/Windows XP setup on my machine. At the moment I can dual boot freely between 98 and XP using the normal dual boot interface, but Windows 10 can't be added to that as both Windows 98 and Windows 10 seem to have to be installed on the C boot drive or they won't work, so to switch between 98/XP and 10 I have to reboot, go into the BIOS, and change the boot drive. This works fine, but is a bit of a pain! I guess Grub4DOS won't fix that, I could see no way when I looked into it before. FWIW I've never seen any problem in just using the MS provided dual boot interface between 98 and XP.

Yes, I've been working that way for many years. I also now have Windows 10 on a completely separate drive as well, but that's another story! The important thing is that you must install Windows 98 to the boot drive C first. Then, as said, install Windows XP to the other partition, which in my case is drive D. My Windows XP drive is actually FAT32, which works fine, and this gives a small advantage in that Windows 98 can access that drive easily if needed without having to have one of the Windows 98 NTFS drivers installed.

If @heinogandacan't do it, nobody can! There are times when you do have to just give things up and move on to other options, of which there are still plenty.