Dave-H

Not yet, but I have downloaded the necessary files. I'll have a go with them later this evening, I'm working in Windows 10 at the moment! I'll let you know how it goes, but I'm very optimistic that it will be fine. Having the interface in US English isn't the end of the world for me of course, but if it's possible to get 52.9.1 to be in British English that will be really good, even if it needs another extension installed to do it. EDIT: I've now installed 52.9.1 with the language pack and the locale switcher. All seems to be working fine!

Thanks guys! I guess this is just too big an ask, even for the geniuses here. I could just do without sound on Windows 98, but an alternative might be just to fit a cheap PCI plugin sound card, and use that for Windows 98. I can free a slot for it. I would want to connect the speakers just to that to avoid having to switch the source when I change operating systems (I do this with my dual graphics cards, using the input switching on a multi-input monitor, but I'd rather not have to do this with the speakers as well!) It would be great if I could use the PCI plugin card just for the actual listening audio, but use the HD onboard hardware for the microphone and line input on Windows XP and Windows 10. Would that be possible? It works OK with the graphics cards, Windows XP is the only OS that both cards have drivers for, and they are both installed and seem to coexist (one card is ATI, the other Nvidia needless to say!) I would hope to find a sound card that has drivers for all three operating systems. There are drivers for all three for the old motherboard's AC'97 sound system, so if I could find a card based on that I would have thought it would do the job. I've had a look, and I found a couple of possibles, but none of them seemed to have Windows 10 drivers, which also have to be 64 bit! Any advice gratefully received. Cheers, Dave.

I just had to change my motherboard, as the old one developed a fault. It was a Supermicro X7DAL-E server board. I was very lucky to find someone selling two of them which turned out to be unused, but they are X7DAL-E+ boards. The only major difference between the X7DAL-E and the X7DAL-E+ is that the former has a Realtek AC'97 onboard sound system, and the latter has a Realtek ALC883 HD onboard sound system. I've got one of the new boards up and running fine, and I found audio drivers for Windows 10 and Windows XP, but I'm having trouble finding a driver for Windows 98SE. There are many listed online which claim to work on Windows 98, but they don't, the installer just says it's not compatible with the OS. Is there any answer or workaround for this? I only want basic sound on Windows 98, nothing fancy. BTW I have absolutely no idea why Supermicro thought that is was necessary to put a 5.1 HD audio system on a server board! Thanks, Dave.

You'll feel at home where I live, in Ealing in West London, there's a huge Polish community here!

It's not even available in different versions of English. US English only.

I assume you've tried a clean startup using the system configuration editor? Is the problem still there if you do a clean startup?

I got a free "upgrade" from Windows 8.1 after the original offer ended before I decided to bite the bullet, by saying I needed Windows 10 for its accessibility features. That was a limited time offer supposedly though, so whether you can still do that I don't know. There was certainly no check on whether you genuinely needed it for that reason or not!

I wonder if MS will restart the free (and perhaps automatic) "upgrade" to Windows 10 "offer" for Windows 7 users when it approaches EOS? If that extends to Windows 8.1 as well, I'll have to be on my guard again on my netbook, as any update to Windows 10 will hose it as there are no compatible graphics drivers for it!

@VistaLover I tried that UA string too, and I got past the first incompatibility error message, but then got a WebGL error message instead. Switching over to my other graphics card, which is much better than the ancient one I normally use on XP, made that error apparently go away, but I've now just got a static picture which appears to have no embedded links, so I'm not sure what you're supposed to do with it to try and go any further.

Thanks, that's very interesting and good to know, but I think I'll stick with the extension, I can see more quickly and easily how that's set, and it doesn't seem to be causing any performance problems.

How do you do that on Firefox without an extension?

I use an add-on called "Custom UserAgent String" which should do that for you, and it will "stick". I have it to spoof the user agent just on Facebook so it serves HTML5 video as it was otherwise dropping back to Flash. There are other add-ons which will also do the same thing, essentially restoring the functionality that Presto Opera had to change the user agent string on a site by site basis.

@xrayer Have you tried reducing the resolution and/or colour depth on the Nvidia Control Panel? Obviously it's a severe problem, but if the Windows Explorer being unstable is the only issue, and all other display functions are fine, I wouldn't have thought that the driver itself was unstable or the card physically faulty. I would have suspected the shell extensions as being the likely culprit too, but if you have disabled them and it makes no difference presumably it can't be that! FWIW I have Nvidia driver version 320.92 installed (this is a Quadro driver, not GeForce) and it works fine, and before that I had GeForce 340.52 installed with a GeForce card, and that worked fine too. Maybe try that version as it certainly worked for me.

I don't know about the others, but to get Otter to work with HTML5 videos on YouTube, I had to replace some files with those from the XP SP2 compatible version. See here. You can download otter-browser-xp2.zip from here. Extract it to a temporary location, select all the files in the Program Files\Otter\lib\gstreamer-1.0 folder, and paste them into the same folder of your working version of Otter, overwriting if necessary. I found that made YouTube videos work fine in Otter on XP. I did it ages ago, and have never had to repeat the operation, even though Otter has been updated many times since then. HTH.

@mixit You sir, are a genius! The addition of the css file (my chrome folder was empty) has fixed it perfectly! I love this forum so much!

Thanks @Mathwiz, I'll have a look at that version of Serpent and see how it goes. I'm not thinking I will abandon FF52ESR imminently. The Instagram video issue is annoying, but I can obviously still view them on my phone or on other browsers (including Google Chrome 49 on XP!) so it's not the end of the world. If other sites start breaking though, I will have to reconsider. Cheers, Dave.

Off topic here of course, but while we're talking about browsers to possibly replace FF 52 ESR, do any or all of these browsers sync with versions of Firefox using the Mozilla sync system? I have other Firefox installations, all of which are the latest version on my phone and on Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 computers, and I wouldn't want to lose bookmarks, history and password sync with them if I went to another browser on Windows XP. EDIT: Thanks for moving this to a more appropriate thread, whoever did it! (@dencorso?)

I can vouch for that, and believe me I've tried! It worked to get Facebook videos back to HTML5 after they dropped back to Flash a while ago, but that's not the same problem as now with Instagram. The fact that the videos still appear in the Page Info dialogue, and will play there, but won't appear in the pages where they should be, would seem likely to be caused by a scripting change Instagram made a few days ago for some reason, which Firefox 52 ESR either can't cope with or doesn't understand at all. The fact that placeholders don't even appear where the videos should be would bear that out. I've seen several posts where there is both a video and a still which can be sideways scrolled between. In that case the still appears correctly, but the video just appears as a white box. In my experience this is the first major compatibility problem to surface after FF 52 ESR came out of support, and I don't think it will easily be fixed I'm afraid.

Thanks @jumper. If you look in the plugins folder in the zipped version of my Eudora 7.1, you will find all the plugins I have installed in my copy of Eudora, which is basically all the plugins I could find online! Cheers, Dave.

@jumper Did you manage to get my upload of Eudora 7.1 to run?

Isn't the MIME type just "video/mp4"?

Yes indeed, see here.

Thanks, that's very interesting as I was having some problems accessing Instagram earlier on today intermittently, and that's probably why. It doesn't explain the problems with the videos displaying though, as they have carried on working in other browsers, just not on Firefox!

Absolutely, Classic Shell (now Open-Shell) is one of the greatest programs ever released IMO, and it's free! It was the only thing that made Windows 8/8.1 usable for me, and even improves the Windows 10 UI enormously. Its writer cannot have enough praise from me!

Yes, my normal installation of Google Chrome 49 (the last that works on XP of course) displays the Instagram videos fine, as it always did! Even more strangely, if I look at the Instagram "Page Info" on the right click in Firefox 52, on the media tab the videos are still listed there, and if I click on them they appear in the preview pane below, and can even be played there. They just no longer appear on the actual Instagram pages! This is very strange indeed, as they obviously aren't actually blocked, they are just not displaying any more on the pages as they should do.