Dave-H

@jumper I take it no more progress with this? I would love to think that using the Bugscreen plugin would potentially be an answer to this, if it can be modified to remove the content that is causing the display delay, but doing that is way out of my league I'm afraid. Cheers, Dave.

Thanks @heinoganda, understood. I guess I can remove the POSReady key, as there is probably no point in it being there any more anyway, but what i will look into is perhaps just suppressing those messages in the logs so they're not recorded any more. I did that on my Windows 10 installation to stop the annoying error messages that were being written to the log on every boot, which have plagued Windows 10 for ages, and Microsoft says to ignore! I'm not sure if you can do it in Windows XP, but I will look into it. Cheers, Dave.

I just tried running my netbook XP installation for the first time in several days, and left it for a while before running the MSE updater. When I looked just before running it, still loads of new error messages in the Windows logs, so MSE is obviously still trying to update itself, and failing. If I had run the updater as soon as I booted into XP would these errors not have happened? If so I will try setting up a scheduled task to run it automatically on boot.

Thanks @actinium! I just tried to open a docx Word file in Office XP on Windows 98SE, and it failed! I'm now just getting an error message which says - "This is a pre-release version of the Compatibility Pack and can only open pre-release Office 2007 files only. Do you want to check for a newer version of the Compatibility Pack?" If I press "Cancel" nothing happens, and if I press "OK" it opens Internet Explorer 6 (!) with a "not-found" page. This is really odd, because I'm sure it used to work! I've tried repairing the installation and uninstalling and re-installing, but the same result. I'm sure it will no longer open files that it used to open, so I don't know what's changed. I did try that Windows 2000 version of the installer you kindly linked me to, but it doesn't work in any KernelEx mode that I tried. It gets past the licence agreement with KernelEx, but then just says the installation failed. I might try extracting the files from it and if there's an msi file and associated cab file in there and try that. It was an msi file I used for the original install, which does still install fine but now no longer actually works. If it now needs SP3 of the Pack I guess I'm stuck, because I never got that to install at all, but it did seem happy without it until now.

Thanks, I will give it a try and let you know how it goes! I'm about to go away on holiday until the beginning of next month, and I will try it when I get back home. Cheers, Dave.

Well if you have a version that would work properly on Windows 98SE it would be great if you could upload it! The version I've got (the later one 12.0.6500.5000, 38.808.920) did actually install on Windows 98, but not properly. It will read later .docx Word documents (which is all I actually need it for) but won't open later Excel or PowerPoint files. It also can't be updated to SP3 or have any of the later patches installed, but I guess that's probably an intrinsic problem.

I downloaded the files OK using Firefox 52.9 ESR. 🤔

The Microsoft link to the Format Converters file indeed doesn't work, but that file and all the others are in the packages @actinium has pointed to in the second post of the thread.

We know! Read from here.

Sorry again for the late response @actinium. Yes, it was indeed a .rar file, sorry for the confusion. I actually repackaged it as a zip file myself! The Office 2007 Compatibility Pack.rar file wouldn't actually open with my old copy of WinRAR, it said it was corrupted, but it does open with 7-Zip. Thanks very much again!

@Mathwiz @DrWho3000 The Compatibility Pack should work with just a base install, but there is a SP3 update for it (KB2526297) plus many other subsequent security patches. See this thread where @actinium has kindly given links to a repository of all the necessary files to install the pack, both for installation and updates until EOS. As an off-topic aside, I never managed to get the Windows 98 installation beyond base level, SP3 would not install on Windows 98.

Good luck! The Office 2007 Compatibility Pack doesn't officially work on Windows 98, but I did get it to install, and it will allow you to read (I don't know about write) .docx Word documents in Windows 98. There's a bigger problem with newer Excel and PowerPoint files unfortunately.

I assume you mean it's opening a window when you start the system. Explorer always starts with Windows, it generates the taskbar, so it will always be present in Task Manager, but it shouldn't show any open windows. What window is it opening?

Ah, if you never actually manually installed Shockwave, that would explain why you don't have that folder. I'm not sure when Macromedia was taken over by Adobe, but I would be surprised if it was before 2001 when XP was first released. I assume Adobe have always kept the Flash installation folder named Macromedia for backwards compatibility, in the same way that some of the Java folders are still named "Sun" many years after they were taken over by Oracle.

Yes, there's a whole thread about it here!

The Shockwave files should be in the \System32\Adobe folder. Mine are all still there.

I'm sure you would be able to pick up an Office XP CD very cheaply now on e-Bay! Assuming your original copy was kosher, the serial number from that should still work with a replacement disk. Personally I would upgrade to Office 2010, which is still in support for a while longer, you can buy genuine (I hope!) serial numbers quite cheaply now, which will come with a link to download the software. That's what I did, and it was very straightforward to do, and legal.

Wow, thank you so much @actinium, and sorry for the delay in my acknowledgement, I didn't get any e-mail notification of your post! So, those 13 cab files are the latest (and last) versions of all the 2007 Compatibility Pack updates, and the exe files in OneDrive_2019-05-19.zip are the same thing just in a different format? I already have the KB2526297 SP3 installation file. Do I need the file format converters file, which is the other one that says it's missing from the zip file, due to having been too large?

Macromedia certainly originally developed Flash, I don't know about Shockwave. They were taken over by Adobe after Flash became hugely successful and pretty ubiquitous on the web. Sites like YouTube completely relied on it in their early days. Things have moved on now finally though, and even Flash's days as a supported technology are numbered. Its downfall was that it was too easily exploited by the bad guys, hence the need for its constant security updates. HTML5 has made it obsolescent anyway, but it will be decades I suspect before Flash disappears from the web completely, if it ever does! What will kill it for practical purposes is when all the current browsers refuse to use it.

Shockwave and Flash are both from Adobe, but are completely different things. I haven't seen a site using Shockwave for years, I've no idea how widely it was ever used, and I'm amazed that Adobe still kept supporting it until very recently. Java on sites is becoming very rare as well, and you don't really need it now at all.

I used Office XP (2002) for many years before finally updating to Office 2010. Office XP won't open the newer .docx Word documents generated by more recent versions of Word unless the Office 2007 Compatibility Pack is installed. I still use that configuration on my netbook, and on Windows 98 on my main machine (Office XP, despite its name, is the last version that works on Windows 98!) The Compatibility Pack is out of support now. Office 2010 is very good on XP, at least it was until recent security updates broke it! It's the last version to work on XP, and the first version to have a 64 bit version, which I use on Windows 10.

I wouldn't dream of using Facebook without it!

I have Office XP (2002) installed on my netbook, which is dual boot Windows XP SP3 and Windows 8.1. It's installed on both operating systems sharing the same Program Files subfolder. I have the Office 2007 Compatibility Pack installed as well, which is installed in different folders on the two operating systems. Now updates for this have ended, I am now wondering what the final updates for it were. The reason I ask is because for quite a while before EOS I was getting updates for the compatibility pack through Microsoft Update on Windows XP, but not on Windows 8.1. This has resulted in the Windows 8.1 installation being out of date relative to the Windows XP installation. Does anyone know what the last update files were for the compatibility pack, for all of its files? If I can find that information I can (hopefully!) download the updates from the Microsoft Update Catalogue and install them on Windows 8.1 to bring it up to date. Thanks, Dave.

Amazingly, and against all my expectations, yes it did! I copied MSO.DLL to a temporary folder, reinstalled KB4462223 via Microsoft Update (which resulted in the Office programs failing), and then put the original MSO.DLL back. Office is now working again, and MS Update is no longer telling me that I've hidden an important update, and when I scan again it says I'm up to date! Thank you very much indeed @Nojus2001, great result!

@heinoganda Thanks, yes that's what I thought. Not too much of a problem for me as I can access the Windows XP registry offline with Registry Workshop when I'm booted into Windows 10.