Dave-H

That URL was one of the ones I tested too. Doesn't work on my system. The plugin window loads, with the right hand side cut off as you say, but after the plugin displays "connecting", "opening", and "ready" the video won't actually play. I also get no right click menu so I can't see what the error actually is. The URL opens fine using IE6 and directly in WMP9. P.S. As CharlesF rightly says, this is may well not actually be a KernelEx problem, so could be off topic for this thread. This has already happened once before with the thread starting to be full of "Opera under Windows 98/ME" problems, which are not necessarily KernelEx related.

Well I've raised a support request about this with MS Windows Update support. I'll see what they say (or if they even respond!)

Just tried it on my system (Opera 11.51), and the plugin loads OK, and the media player plugin window appears, but no videos I've tried will actually play. The error message if you right click on the player window is usually "network error". This happens even on URLs which will play OK in WMP9 itself. Try configuring Opera to open the video in the actual media player rather than using the plugin.

I sadly can also confirm that the old Windows Update v4 site is now just looping between two addresses and never loading. I thought it was just me, but obviously not! I feel that this must be a fault, as MS have always maintained that existing updates for Windows 98/ME would still remain available, and they do usually announce if that sort of thing has changed. Anyway, surely they would just redirect it to a page informing people that Windows Update was no longer available rather than just making it look as if it's a fault! It looks to me as if it's redirecting to the Windows Update v6 address, and then bouncing straight back again, so I suspect that the v4 site is still there, it's the detection system that detects that you have Windows 98 or ME that isn't working properly, and it's trying to send you to the v6 site in error. It's annoying because even though there was never anything new there when I looked of course, it did enable me to look at my update history, and I now see no way of doing that if the page won't load! Is it worth sending an e-mail to MS about this? Has anyone here already done so? EDIT I've just managed to get into the Windows Update site on Windows 98 using Opera, as you can tell Opera to mask itself as Internet Explorer. This time it didn't bounce back to another address, but what I'm seeing may actually be the v6 Windows Update site not the v4 one. As it relies on ActiveX controls, which Opera doesn't support, I can't go any further to check.

Just to add my observations to this, I can confirm the behaviour of Opera 11.5x that it crashes if you try to open more than one instance under 98SE. I'm using 11.51. I also get the strange Google page reported by ivanbuto! Interestingly, under XP (I have a dual boot machine) if you try to open a second instance of Opera, you get an error message relating to the Opera Mail client, that it cannot access data because something else already has it open, obviously the first instance of Opera. If you dismiss the error message the second Opera opens OK though. I did try disabling the Opera Mail client to see if this enabled a second instance of Opera to open under 98SE, but it still crashed. Apart from this, Opera 11.51 seems to be working pretty well for me under 98SE.

That's certainly my thinking at the moment. It looks as if it's not going to get any further work done on it anytime soon, so it would be good if someone could make the decision to declare SP3 to be out of beta. I suppose that can only be done now if there are enough people to come forward and say that they have installed it and it has caused no problems for them.

I installed SP2.1a ages ago, and never had any problem with it. I've never felt the need to update to SP3, particularly as it has always worried me that it has never officially come out of beta. Also, I've installed many of the unofficial updates to Windows 98SE from MDGx, and used the latest (and presumably last) version of Autopatcher on my system. Does SP3 include anything of note that I haven't already got anyway?

Thanks for the suggestion nsaini10, but as you'll see above, the problem has actually now gone away! I don't know exactly why it has though. I had already tried doing as clean a boot as possible, with the bare minimum of processes and services running, in fact the bare minimum needed to run the operating system, and the problem was still there when i tried that, which is a bit of a mystery!

Hi Geej. Yes I had tried several times doing clean boots with an absolute minimum of processes running, both by using msconfig and by just manually shutting things down in Task Manager (which I realise doesn't unload any drivers). i was actually very surprised that when I apparently had an absolute minimal number of processes running and drivers loaded that the slow shutdown problem was still there!

Yes, that's exactly the program I'm talking about. Been on the machine for quite some time now, in fact since soon after I upgraded from Windows 2000 to Windows XP (it doesn't work on Windows 2000). Never caused a problem, although that mystery registry key that was pointing to a non-existent profile folder has always niggled me. Whether finally fixing the path made the slow shutdown problem go away I have no idea, but the problem did seem to spontaneously disappear after I fixed it. Of course i did have to go into Safe Mode to fix it, so maybe that had an effect, although I'd been into Safe Mode before with no apparent effect on the problem. I have a feeling that we'll never know for sure what the cause and cure were. Don't you just love computers!

Well I have good news. The problem seems to have gone! Unfortunately, as is often the way with this sort of thing in my experience, I'm not 100% sure exactly why it has gone away. I restored everything back to how it was before I started messing around with extra profiles. I restored a version of the registry from before I made the "Admin" or "Test" profiles, and deleted their user folders. As I expected the problem was still there of course, as the problem was there when the registry backup was made. I then decided to clean the registry of any references to other profiles, and there was one old key, generated by Rapport, that had always referenced the non-existent "Admin" profile, which I think is a profile that is on most XP machines as one of the defaults. Now Rapport protects all its files and registry keys from alteration or deletion, as all good security programs do, and I've never had any luck modifying this key before. I decided to try in Safe Mode, which for some reason I'd never done before, and was surprised to find that I could now modify the key to reference the "Dave" profile instead of "Admin". After that I rebooted, and on the next reboot, the system shut down normally, and the error events had gone! The key in question referred to one of Rapport's services, RapportPG. I have no idea what that service does. Whether doing that profile path correction cured the problem I really can't be sure. I'm certainly not going to put it back as it was before to find out now it's working properly again! I just can't believe it was that simple to cure the problem, as that registry key with the incorrect path had been there for weeks and weeks before the slow shutdown problem appeared. Again one of those things that we'll never know, but I'll certainly be looking out for the problem re-appearing, and making sure that it isn't there before I do any system backups in the future! As always, many thanks to all the people who helped out with this issue. This forum is the greatest!

Not good news. It appears that I was fooling myself when I assumed that the cause of the problem was just in my user profile. After a lot of experimenting with different profiles, I discovered that the problem is in fact happening on every shutdown or logoff, regardless of which profile is loaded! I was being fooled by the fact that using the "Admin" profile, for instance, the logoff/shutdown does not hang on "saving your settings" like it does on my normal "Dave" profile. It is still writing event 1517 messages into the Application Event Log though, so it is still happening. I suspect that it isn't noticeably hanging as the "Admin" profile is so much smaller than the "Dave" profile. So, now what? The cause could be absolutely anywhere..........

@ Geej Thanks very much for going to all that trouble! I'd got most of those entries that were in "Dave" but not in "Admin" by much more laborious methods than using Excel! I had identified - MCPS.DLL MSISIP.DLL pwrshsip.dll wmpband.dll wshext.dll xapauthenticodesip.dll I had missed - dot3dlg.dll OneX.DLL WINSTA.dll There's also TMAS_OEHook.dll, which was on my list but not yours. That's part of Trend Internet Security. xapauthenticodesip.dll is part of Silverlight, as you say. pwrshsip.dll is part of Windows Powershell. I'm looking at other options at the moment, based on it probably being a problem with something that's being referenced in the user registry. @MagicAndre1981 I've been going through the HKEY_CURRENT_USER section in the registry, removing things to see if I can identify what key or keys is generating the problem. I've deleted huge chunks, most of the SOFTWARE section for instance, and it makes no difference so far. I now have a NTUSER.DAT file which is only 6.29 MB in size, and the problem is still there, so you are quite right about it not being a registry size issue. I will keep at it and hope that eventually I'll get a normal shutdown and I can then identify which section of the user registry i need to investigate.

Well, because I've decided to probably keep the "Admin" profile permanently for future troubleshooting purposes, I made a new temporary profile called "Temp". It shut down fine too. I then copied my "Dave" profile over to it, and it no longer shuts down properly! After a long and laborious process of substituting profile folders from the "Admin" folder to the "Test" folder, it turns out that the file substitution which clears the problem is simply "NTUSER.DAT"! If i put the file from the "Admin" folder into the "Test" folder, "Test" then shuts down fine. With its normal file, it doesn't. Now my understanding is that this file is the registry data for that user, which makes me wonder why using Registry Workshop to restore a copy of the registry from before the problem appeared didn't make the problem go away. I can only assume that this file isn't backed up by Registry Workshop, which isn't good news! Anyway, it now does look like the problem is in the registry after all, but how on earth do I find out where it is?! I was surprised at the huge difference in the size of the NTUSER.DAT files. The one from the "clean" profile "Admin" is 1.25 MB. The one from the faulty profile is 14.5 MB! Presumably it's not this causing the problem? I thought that registry size was not an issue with XP.

My last idea is to create a new user profile and if it works there, run the Windows Easy Transfer program to migrate the user data and settings to the new account. Well I'd already tried making another profile, which I then deleted, but I did it again and made a profile called "Admin". As before, that does not have the slow shutdown problem, although it does have all the "All Users" drivers loaded and processes running of course. I will keep it this time as it will aid troubleshooting to have a good profile to compare with the faulty one. One of the things not apparently running in "Admin" is Windows Search, so I tried resetting that and re-indexing as you suggested earlier. Unfortunately no difference. Thanks Geej! I ran the ListDLLs utility using the parameters you suggested, both using my normal "Dave" profile, and the new "Admin" profile mentioned above. The Dave one is here - DLLlistDave.txt and the Admin one is here - DLLlistAdmin.txt I'm not sure exactly what they show, but I was surprised how similar they are. Anything catch your eye as being out of the ordinary?

Hi Andre! I've uploaded another trace here. This one has the REGISTRY parameter added. It seemed to work OK. It was taken on a normal shutdown, with everything running that's normally running on boot. I can do another one from a minimal startup if that will make things clearer. Thanks for sticking with this! Cheers, Dave.

Thanks Andre, I really appreciate everything you've done so far! There is another memory dump here. This one was taken after using msconfig to run the system with a minimum of programs and services running. The dump was initiated later than the first one too, while the sysem was hung on "saving your settings". I hope it may be more useful. Off to bed now (1.30 am here in England!) Thanks everyone who has helped with this so far. I've never had a problem with my system yet that hasn't been solved with the help of MSFN, and I'm sure that this won't be the first to not be solved! Thanks guys and good night! Cheers, Dave.

OK, the complete memory dump is here. I generated it as soon as the system was told to shutdown, as I didn't think it would work if I left it any later. It's pretty big, even zipped up! I hope it gives someone a clue as to what's happening here. Thanks, Dave.

OK, all third party processes killed in Task Manager. Another trace here. Even killed Explorer before running the trace. Shutdown still slow...........

OK, there's another trace here. This is with Norton Unerase Protection disabled, Trend Internet Security disabled, and the Windows Search Service and Indexing Service disabled. The file seems to be a lot smaller! The shutdown is still slow. Thanks for sticking with this, I wish I could look at these traces myself! Cheers, Dave.

Thanks, very interesting. I disabled the Norton Unerase Protection service, which didn't seem to change the shutdown problem, but I've run another trace without it enabled. It should be here. Has this changed things much, if at all? Rapport is an on-line banking login security program, from a company called Trusteer. It's been on my system for some time, and never caused any problems as far as I know. It is another program that auto updates itself though.

Thanks guys! Glad to have it confirmed that extracting the files from the 32 bit installer and replacing the ones in the folder with them would work. Thanks MagicAndre1981. I did just that, and it did work! So, I've got the trace. As I expected from what I'd read, I can't view it myself, as xperfview.exe does not work (it doesn't generate any error messages, it just doesn't do anything!) so I hope someone else can look at it for me. Unfortunately, I can't attach it here, as it's too big! Even zipped up it's 8.5MB. I've uploaded it to a website I maintain. It should be there if you right click and save here. If someone could analyse it for me I'd be very grateful. Thanks, Dave.

I have actually already done all that, and I think I've narrowed it down to Explorer being the process that's causing the problem. As I said, I've run the computer with a bare minimum of processes running, and the shutdown still isn't normal. It only becomes fast again if I kill explorer.exe before I shut down. I don't think there's any doubt that Explorer is causing the problem, the only question is why would it suddenly start behaving that way?!

@ allen2 Surely they are Windows core processes that should always be running? They are running under SYSTEM user name, not "Dave". Is that not correct? @MagicAndre1981 I managed to install the Performance Tools, but when I run XBOOTMGR I just get a message that it's not a valid Win32 application. I think that the trouble is that the Windows 7 laptop that I used to install it on and copy the files from is a 64 bit Windows 7 system. I tried to install the 32 bit version, but it wouldn't let me, so I had to install the 64 bit version. Is this why it won't work on my XP system, which is 32 bit? If that is the problem, the only thing I can think of trying is to extract the files from the 32 bit installer using UniExtract (or hope that they're all sitting in the temp folder if I don't complete the install) and then just copy them over to the folder on my system. It does actually install on XP anyway, but only with a very limited set of options, basically just the WPF Performance Suite. None of the other options that are there on the Windows 7 installation appear.

Thanks guys! To respond to you all in order - @MagicAndre1981 I have access to a friend's laptop with Windows 7 Home Premium on it, so I will try what you suggest and report back. @dencorso Hi Den! Unfortunately although I now back up my system regularly, I didn't become aware of this problem until after I'd done my last backup, and I only keep one, so I'm afraid that isn't an option this time. Believe me, I would have done it by now if it was! @allen2 Thanks, I do have autoruns installed and will check things on there. I have tried closing things down one by one to try and track down the culprit, but with no luck. As I said in my OP I've done a diagnostic startup using msconfig, and that didn't clear the problem. In that mode I've got down to just the following still running in Task Manager - LSASS.EXE SERVICES.EXE WINLOGON.EXE CSRSS.EXE SMSS.EXE 2 x SVCHOST.EXE (This I assume is the Remote Procedure Call and DCOM Server Process Launcher services, which are the two services which seem to have to be running.) Also Task Manager itself of course, and Explorer. As I said, if I kill Explorer in this mode, the shutdown is then normal, which I am assuming means that it is the culprit. Shutting down Explorer when the system is running normally with everything loaded does not cure the slow shutdown though, which I don't understand! I use Trend Internet Security, which has been working fine for ages, although an automatic update could have caused the problem of course. However the problem is still there even with all its processes shut down, so I don't think it's got anything to do with it. @Joseph_sw I did check the permissions on the HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders registry key, and everything seemed to be what I would expect. BTW I should have mentioned in my OP that the system shuts down fine from Safe Mode, but I expect you all assumed that anyway! Thanks, Dave.