Dave-H

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.

I thought there was a problem removing the POSReady key once it was there, the system wouldn't let you do it while it was running so you had to access the registry from elsewhere without XP running to be able to delete it.

Strange, I still seem to be getting notifications OK.

The update program still works fine, the problem is only that MSE is still trying to do its own updates, and is now failing and writing loads of error messages into the Windows Event Logs. Part of the problem is that it's trying to update the engine, which can now no longer be updated as the current versions are not XP compatible.

As always it depends on what else you have running at the same time as the browser. I've seen Firefox eat nearly 1GB of RAM with multi process enabled. Just experiment with it, and if it causes issues, just changing browser.tabs.remote.force-enable to false should disable it.

OK, well up to you if you want to keep multi process enabled or not. I found that it gave a significant performance improvement on sites like Facebook. You do need a lot of free memory to use it though, so I wouldn't recommend it if you're very short of RAM!

If you don't have browser.tabs.remote.force-enable present now, you shouldn't be seeing multiple processes, as I couldn't get it to work until I added that setting. This is what I have - browser.tabs.remote.force-enable=true browser.tabs.remote.autostart=true browser.tabs.remote.autostart.2 - not present and apparently not necessary, can be removed by resetting it and restarting the browser. extensions.e10sBlocksEnabling=false - this setting will prevent any problems with some add-ons being blocked when multi-process is enabled. dom.ipc.processCount=4 These settings seem to work fine for me.

browser.tabs.remote.force-enable seems to be in your list twice. Which one is right?! Is it there or isn't it?

If you haven't made any other changes apart from to that one setting, you shouldn't be seeing multipole processes. What are your settings in these parameters? browser.tabs.remote.force-enable browser.tabs.remote.autostart browser.tabs.remote.autostart.2 (may not be present) extensions.e10sBlocksEnabling dom.ipc.processCount

Interesting, I always assumed that MS Update looked at the file versions on the system to determine if an update was needed, perhaps it doesn't! I'll give it a try, it would be nice to have a "clean" MS Update without the nag that I've hidden an important update.

Thanks @heinoganda, I've applied the new batch file, I'll keep an eye on the event logs and see what happens. I don't really want to remove the POSReady key, although with the end of updates I'm wondering whether it is really now necessary to keep it! Cheers, Dave.

You can't enable multi process with just that setting, the others mentioned earlier in the thread have to be set as well, especially browser.tabs.remote.force-enabled which overrides the fact that multi process is specifically disabled on XP systems. Look in your Windows Task Manager, if there is only one firefox.exe process running, it's not enabled. I wouldn't worry about the plugin container process, at least on my system it only runs when I visit a site that uses Flash. I can't see that there would be any great advantage in disabling it unless you have a bad resource shortage problem. It does keep the browser more stable, as before it was introduced a crash in a plugin could take the whole browser down!

Indeed so, and surely if you put the old MSO.DLL back, Microsoft Update will just nag you to install the patch again?!

KB4462223 is the latest broken update, from April. KB4461614 is an older version, not that this helps at all of course!