Dave-H

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.

Thanks again. Yes, I will probably disable ctfmon.exe as I don't need it and it's using precious resources! Good to see that you should be able to save as a .doc file using the Explorer interface, I will have to investigate further as to why I'm not being offered it. I'm sure on my system the dialogue box did still appear with the default KernelEx mode on MOC.EXE. I will probably never use it, but it annoys me when something that should work doesn't and I don't know why!

Thanks again @deomsh! I have done all those setting for KernelEx on all the files you mentioned. It seems to be "Windows NT 4.0 SP6a" in the latest version of KernelEx, but I guess it's the same result. I was still getting crashes when opening .xlsx files, and I discovered that ctfmon.exe was causing the problem. Putting the "Windows 2000 SP4" KernelEx mode on that file cured that I'm glad to say! Seems pretty much OK now, apart from the "SaveAs..." option in Explorer not offering to save as a .doc file. Did it ever actually do this? I'm starting to wonder now if it was only ever designed to save files as .docx or .docm. Perhaps that's the only way it does convert, .doc to .docx, not the other way, .docx to .doc. It still offers to save using the DOS filename too, but I guess that's probably nothing to worry about. I was hoping that @jumper would erm, "jump" in here to comment on the KernelEx side of this, but I think he may be away as he hasn't posted anywhere for a while I don't think. Cheers, Dave.

Hi again, and sorry for the delay since my last post. I'm now using the KernelEx 4.5.2016.20 core.ini file "as is" without any modifications, and have re-done all the KernelEx settings. I have "Windows 2000 SP4" mode set on the following files - Excelcnv.exe, Excelcnvpxy.dll, MOC.exe, and Wordconv.exe. Office XP now displays .docx Word files fine, and .xlsx Excel files sometimes open, but sometimes crash and/or lock up the system. I guess there's no hope for newer PowerPoint files. The "Save As..." Explorer dialogue on Word files is as before, doesn't offer saving as .doc. Cheers, Dave.

With the older KernelEx core.ini file installed, and the excelcnv.exe file set to KernelEx "Windows NT 4.0 SP6" mode as you said, it does work most of the time, but is very prone to crashing and locking up the system. I suspect this is due to running out of resources on my system, which has always had a low resource problem on Windows 98, due I suspect to it being based on a server motherboard which was fundamentally not designed for Windows 98! It only runs at all because of rloew's patches. The "Save As..." function in explorer is still not right, it still won't actually convert and doesn't offer doc as a save format.

Of course, but why carry on using an obsolete security program when there are other free security programs available which are still compatible and still receiving definition updates?

@deomsh Well, that was exactly what it was! I replaced core.ini from KernelEx 4.5.2016.20 with the one from KernelEx 4.5.2016.18, the Compatibility Pack works perfectly again! I really must apologise to you for not following your suggestions before this. It would probably have lead me straight to the cause of the problem! @jumper If you could follow this, it looks as if a change made in core.ini between KernelEx 4.5.2016.18 and 4.5.2016.20 has caused a problem with the Office 2007 Compatibility Pack, and therefore could presumably potentially cause problems with other programs. Cheers, Dave.

No it isn't! NT2K is listed in the core.ini for version 4.5.2016.18 of KernelEx, but not in the core.ini for version 4.5.2016.20. I wonder if that's the problem? It would bear out that it stopped working when I updated KernelEx!

If it's a requirement for the program, it may well have installed it anyway!