Dave-H

The latest Flash plugin version is now 11.6.602.168 I believe.

As an aside, I think you should always have disk caching enabled on any browser, no matter how fast your internet connection is. If you don't, you will be re-downloading things from the web un-necessarily, which increases net congestion for everybody.

There are plenty of posts on the Opera user forum from people suffering poor performance even with the latest version under supported operating systems. Others always come back saying they have no problems at all! I guess there are just some systems that Opera doesn't perform well on. It would be good if a common cause could be found, but I suspect that's unlikely. I've been using Opera for years, since version 7, and never had any major problems with it (touch wood!)

I've never had any real problems with Opera 12.02. I consider that it will probably be the last version that will work under Windows 98, and therefore the most secure. There's odd niggles like not being able to move things around on the toolbars, but in actual use it seems to be stable and fast.

That is normal behaviour for Windows 98 network setup in my experience. It is very annoying but isn't a symptom of any problem AFAIK.

And to you too PROBLEMCHYLD! Thanks for all you've done for us.

I think you're absolutely right to make this decision. Trying to produce a service pack with full up to date USB support for all possible hardware configurations must be impossible, so it's best not to include it at all. People who want better USB support in Windows 98SE can easily investigate other solutions which they can try.

thanks for the confirmation that this works Yes it does, and I just noticed I said "Task Manager" when I meant "Task Scheduler" of course! I've corrected it where I can to stop anyone reading this in the future getting confused! One thing I forgot to mention is that if you have a Windows 8 CD like mine, it may well have two versions of Windows 8 on it, the normal version and the Pro version. If you look at the contents of the CD there will be two folders, called "1" and "2". Windows 8 Professional is in folder 1 and Windows 8 is in folder 2 on my CD. You can conform this by looking at the contents of the XML file which is with the folders. It probably doesn't matter with the tasks, although some may only exist in the Pro version, but other files you may extract should be the ones for the right version of Windows 8 of course!

Hi Mark! You do need access to the "install.wim" file on a Windows 8 CD, or another source. MS seem to have abandoned CAB files in favour of this, which I didn't know not having used anything later than XP! This compressed file seems to contain the Windows system files. It can be opened with 7-Zip, at least that's what I used, just Google for it, it's free. Note that you will need version 9.30 of 7-Zip though, which is an Alpha version, but seems OK. I couldn't open the .wim file with the current release version, 9.20. There were a couple of error messages when I opened the file in 7-zip, but it all seemed to still work OK. Open the Windows 8 Task Scheduler, and identify the faulty tasks from the error messages. Make a note of their names. Look in the Windows\System32\tasks folders on your machine and find and delete the files that correspond to the faulty tasks, whichever sub-folder they are in. Make a note of the names and which folder each one was in, to make sure you put the replacements in the right folder! Then reboot and go back to Task Scheduler. There should now be no error messages. Go to Windows\System32\tasks folder in the install.wim file using 7-Zip, and browse for the task files you want to replace. Use 7-Zip to copy them to your desktop. Now you need to replace the files with the good ones. The vital thing to do is that you must put an ".xml" extension on the new files, or Task Scheduler won't import them! The extracted versions on your desktop won't have any file extensions at all, so you'll need to add them. Once you've done that, go back to Task Scheduler, and look for the folder(s) in the tasks library where you want the files to go. When you have the folder open, right click and select "import". Import the appropriate file from your desktop. Its parameters window should open, and just click OK. It should appear in the list, but the entry will look very sparse. This should come good when you re-boot. I did mine one at a time for safety, re-booting each time I added one. Fortunately I only had four to do! Once you've done that, the entries should be complete again, and no error messages! I'm off to bed. Good luck! Cheers, Dave.

Just found this thread when trying to fix a very similar problem. I had three tasks that were complaining that "The task XML contains an unexpected node" when running the Windows 8 Task Scheduler. One of the tasks was also generating huge numbers of errors in the Windows event logs, which is why I investigated the problem in the first place. I fixed it by just re-importing the tasks from the Windows installation CD, as has been suggested I see. I guess the originals must have got corrupted somehow, and it is the fix. Longtime on MSFN, but my first post in the Windows 8 forum. I've only just got Windows 8 on my new second machine, and never had Vista or Seven, only XP and 98, so it's been a bit of a steep learning curve!

I don't think that toughcustomer's Opera version (10.63) need KernelEx at all to run. That version works on Windows 98 anyway IIRC. It is a mystery why installing KernelEx (if indeed that was the cause) should have corrupted it.

You can't just open wand.dat by double clicking on it. It does contain your password data, but not in any readable form, for obvious reasons! Only Opera can open it for editing. The notes and bookmarks files can be read in notepad as they are plain text. Good luck with the undelete!

@toughcustomer Sorry to hear what happened to you, I learnt the hard way too years ago that you should always back your computer up before making any change that affects the whole OS! There was, of course, no reason for you to think that installing KernelEx would wipe any of your Opera data, and I must say that I have no idea why that would have happened. Anyway, the files you need to restore are bookmarks.adr (if you want your bookmarks restored), notes.adr (for notes), and global_history.dat (for history). If you had passwords saved, they are in wand.dat. These files should be in your profile folder if you have Opera set to single user. Search for them and you'll find where they are on your system. If you're very lucky there may be backed up versions of them in the folder, which earlier versions of Opera used to make. If not, you could try an undelete program (just Google, there are good free ones around, some of which at least should work under Windows 98) and see if you can undelete earlier versions of those files from the drive. As with all undelete operations, the success will depend on how much free drive space you have, and how much you've used the machine since the problem happened. If you have little drive space free and have used the machine a lot, there is a much higher risk that the data you want will have been over-written. Good luck!

Doesn't run at all because of of a shedload of new missing functions in opera.dll dependencies and from what I can see it would appear that even Windows 2000 isn't supported anymore (opera.dll directly dependent on uxtheme.dll). And it wouldn't surprise me if 10.50 were to drop support for XP as to satisfy the behemoth who gives Opera loads of dosh for the bing search integration. Time to install Kexstub and see if it can do something but I fear that the missing getadapteraddress function in iphlpapi.dll has to actually exist to be able to use the network. Oh dear, that is very bad news. If 12.02 is the last version of Opera that will run on Windows 98SE that is very sad.

Yes, thanks PROBLEMCHYLD! You need to change the date in your signature, it still says the last update was Sept 23rd.

Never for one moment think that what you've done is worthless! Even if it does go no further, it's still a fantastic piece of work that you should be proud of!

I agree, it's then more accurately termed an Enhancement Pack IMO, which is a completely different animal.

Good for you PROBLEMCHYLD! I don't recall Microsoft offering any options in their OS Service Packs, you installed it or you didn't, end of story. If it broke things because of the type of hardware or configuration of your system, you sorted it out afterwards. There are always going to be a few people who will run into problems after a blanket update of system files, and you will never finish this if you try and take all their possible problems into account. People with problems are right to mention them of course, but if you decide that what's there is good enough to work in the vast majority of cases, and the flagged problems are not going to be widespread enough to modify the SP to take them into account, that is your decision and that should be accepted and respected.

The wrapper was introduced in Opera 12.00, supposedly to make the browser more stable by preventing crashing plugins from bringing down the whole browser. It's a separate executable in its own sub-folder within the Opera folder. There was a lot of adverse feedback on the Opera forums about it, especially relating to multiple copies running with excessive use of resources. This is why they have decided to temporarily remove it (the stated reason is stability problems, not excessive resource use, but most seem to think that's the real problem!) The trouble with Windows 98 is that the plugin wrapper program won't run under Windows 98, causing a crash in user.exe. There seems to be no way around this, all you can do is close the program after it crashes. Opera will then run OK, but with no plugin support. I've never had the plugin wrapper freeze or crash the whole operating system, I've always just been able to dismiss the crash message and carry on, but others have had worse problems with it.

Thanks, I was aware of that, in fact I'm using Opera 12.02 to send this! I'm really hoping that when they re-introduce the plugin wrapper, which I'm sure they will, they put in a user option to disable it and use the old method of loading plugins. I'm not holding my breath for that, but it would be really good if they did.

I'm not sure that "LICENSE.TXT" is the best place to put the instructions. That file would normally contain legal stuff, disclaimers and that sort of thing, not installation information. I would have thought that a "README.TXT" file would be more appropriate. Of course some people will not follow the instructions even if they do find them, but those that do wish to use them properly I would have thought would more expect to find them in a Readme file than a License file. Just a suggestion.

Hear hear! This is PROBLEMCHYLD's project, and I would hope that we're all very grateful for what he has done and continues to do with it. As it is his project, at the end of the day what he says goes. People are quite entitled to make suggestions, even to criticise if they think that mistakes have been made, but ultimately PROBLEMCHYLD has the last word, whether you agree or not.

Working great here, with all plugins and no crashes! I really hope they put in an option to disable the plugin wrapper when they reintroduce it, but I'm not holding my breath.

The link's also at the bottom of all PROBLEMCHYLD's posts, but there doesn't seem to be anything available to download at the moment.

Hurrah, I will be able to use Opera plugins on Windows 98 again! I really hope that even when they re-introduce it, as they inevitably will, there will be an option to switch it off or on.