Dave-H

That explains it, although I have to say that "subscriber" just sounds like you're a normal forum member, not someone who's contributing money. I used to like the flashy banner with the dollar sign on it, it made me feel important (isn't that really sad ?)!

I seem to have been reverted to just being a "subscriber" to the forum when I was a "sponsor" before, and presumably actually still am! Also my forum settings are set to automatically "follow" any threads that I post in, but I wasn't getting any e-mails about new posts in this thread, and I've now had to subscribe to it manually, so it looks as if that facility isn't working now either! How strange that the new forum software, although it took a bit of getting used to, did work reasonably well for ages, but now seems to be all going wrong!

I still have those first two keys on my system, and I'm still getting the updates. The "Installed" DWORD is set to "0" on both of them. It does look as if just the presence of those keys does not cause a problem, unlike the WindowsEmbedded key, which did.

Doesn't the link you get when you use the "share" button at the top right of posts work as a link to that post? It seems to for me. And yes, the edit system not working at the moment IS a real PITA!

You're not the only one! I tried to edit my previous post (to correct "quite" instead of "quiet"!) and I'm just getting a message that says "REQUIRED" in red capital letters. I guess there's a fault with the forum at the moment.

That may be why Avast are keeping quite about it of course! The guy concerned is one of the very long-standing and respected contributors to the Opera forums, so I didn't immediately dismiss what he was saying. I did find it hard to believe though, as surely it would have been mentioned here and elsewhere by now if it were true.

I've been in an interesting conversation here with someone on the Opera browser forums. He says his AV software (Avast it appears) downloads and applies Windows Updates on XP systems along with its AV patterns etc. This is with no registry or otherwise modifications to the system. Has anyone else heard of this, I can find no reference to it on Avast's website?

My understanding is that you need XP SP3 to do a clean install of versions of Firefox after 43.0.1, which is why only that version is offered on XP systems, presumably because the downloader can't verify that SP3 is installed. Once you have version 43 installed, you can then upgrade it all the way to the current 46 provided that you have SP3. There is no suggestion that versions after 46 won't support XP SP3.

I can't see anything on the Mozilla site that says or implies that Firefox 46 is the last for XP. I was very impressed when I tried Slimjet 10 that it not only worked on XP apparently using Chromium 50, as already mentioned, but also that it still works with the Java and Silverlight NPAPI plugins!

Thanks jaclaz. It's always good to know that you're not the only one seeing a particular problem!

Thanks! It's almost certainly a browser compatibility problem (it looks OK in the other browsers I have installed) but the strange thing is that it didn't immediately happen when the forum software was first upgraded. It suddenly started to happen only a couple of weeks ago when nothing else seemed to have changed.

Anyone?

IIRC correctly when I last looked at Windows 10, you could now at least add colour to the windows' title bars, but it had to be the same colour than you chose for the taskbar, which is not really a substitute for being able to set all those things independently of each other as you could in the past.

Funny you should say that Noel, I'm exactly the same. I have Windows 98, Windows XP, and Windows 8.1 on my machine, and the start menus on all three look as identical as they possibly can do, thanks to Classic Shell. It was actually the only thing that made certainly the original Windows 8 usable IMO.

What a fantastic program Classic Shell is (and no, I don't work for them!) It's one of those pieces of software that's so good you really can't believe that it's free. One of the (many) things I didn't like about Windows 10 when I tried it was the horrible and unchangeable white window title bars. If the latest Classic Shell can change that easily, it's got to be worth having for that alone IMO (I'm still not going back to Windows 10 though!)

My avatar at the top of all the MSFN forum pages has suddenly become much too large! It only looks like that on my default browser (Opera 12.18) and was fine after the forum software update, so that isn't the cause. Any idea why it would suddenly change, and if I can fix it? It's fine on my posts, it's just the one at the top of the pages that's wrong.

Thanks @heinoganda! That's good to know as I don't want to keep archive copies of superseded installation files.

All this month's updates seem to have installed fine here. Does anyone know whether the new KB3142029 update for .NET 4 replaces any previous updates, as some in the past have done? If it does I can ditch the installers from the outdated updates.

Thanks @sdfox7, but thanks to help from @dencorso, updating the Roots Certificates and spoofing the User Agent, I can now load the basic Google search page in IE6SP1 on Windows 98SE. What I can't load is Google Advanced Search, as it uses https, or indeed any other https pages. This seems to be unfixable.

Well things seem to have changed again for the last few days. On both my XP computers, any attempt to use the help links in the Event Log entries now results in the Windows Help and Support Center window just coming up and "not responding" permanently and eventually having to be forcibly shut down. On Windows 8.1 the links all still all just going to the Microsoft homepage.

Well I think I might have now got it to install. I tried in Safe Mode and it wouldn't run at all, so I then tried again in normal mode with everything closed except Explorer. Nothing looked any different when I ran it, but checking HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components\{EF289A85-8E57-408d-BE47-73B55609861A} now, it is showing version 46,0,2195,0 installed, which I think is the latest. Still no joy with IE6 though, it still shows "cannot load page" on Google. Anything else I can try?

Let's hope so, fingers crossed!

So Windows Update is working normally it seems! If you do a manual check presumably it shows no updates available? Updates usually only come once a month, on the so-called "Patch Tuesday" which is the second Tuesday of the month, so I wouldn't expect to see any more now until May 10th unless there is an emergency patch release for any reason.

If you look under Help>About Internet Explorer on IE, what version does it actually say you've got? IE8 is the highest version for XP. If it is indeed IE7 or IE8 you have installed, it may be that the Windows Update components are missing or corrupted.

Thanks guys and sorry for the delay in replying. I tried downloading and installing Blackwingcat's latest certificate update file, but it doesn't seem to install. When I run it I just get a progress window that flashes up for an instant and then vanishes, and checking the entry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components\{EF289A85-8E57-408d-BE47-73B55609861A} it still doesn't seem to be the right version. Any ideas why it wouldn't be installing as it's supposed to work with 98SE?