Dave-H

My system details need a bit of an update now too! I decided to change my graphics card back to the nVidia one I tried out some time ago, as I'm now running more demanding applications on the XP side of the system. The card is now a XFX branded nVidia GeForce 7950GT AGP card with 512 MB of memory on-board. Works fine with the unofficial tweaked nVidia Display Driver 82.69 at 1920 x 1080 (I've finally bought a 21st century monitor!) The AGP aperture is now set to 128 MB (the only configuration that works with the card IIRC). I now have only (!) 3071 MB available to Win 98SE. I'm putting up with the bad 98 shutdown caused by the card, in every other respect the system is running beautifully! Cheers, Dave.

Brilliant! Glad you got it sorted.

Hi Joe! I'd almost forgotten about this! Did you use Driver Cleaner to completely wipe all traces of the 4.06 driver? If not, uninstall the driver you've got loaded, clean the system with Driver Cleaner, and try reinstalling version 4.00 again. I think that's what eventually worked for me. Good luck! Cheers, Dave.

If it's part of Visual Studio, not Windows, I wouldn't have thought it should be in the Service Pack at all!

I have it on my machine, in the Windows 98 system folder (version 6.0.0.8424) and in the XP Internet Explorer folder (version 9.0.30729.1) and in Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VS7Debug (version 7.0.9466.0). It appears to be part of a Microsoft Visual Studio debugger.

If it were possible to get the opera_plugin_wrapper.exe in Opera 12 to run without crashing on Windows 98 I for one would be eternally grateful!

None taken PROBLEMCHYLD. I think KEx is a worthwhile tool if you want to keep some things working on 98, as long as you're aware of its limitations. Whether it should be included in the pack is completely up to you.

Quite agree. I've been using KernelEx for ages, and never had a moment's problem with it. It enables me to run Opera and Java 6 and Flash 10. Whether its files should be included in a future version of the service pack is debatable. I would say not. I certainly would have no problem with KernelEx being included as an optional extra install though.

Updated to Opera 12.00 today, and can confirm the problems. The Opera plugin wrapper program crashes when run, with the error in user.exe. If the error is dismissed and the plugin wrapper executable is closed down, Opera then works reasonably well, but with no plugin support of course. YouTube videos still play, using HTML5. Things like QuickTime plugins are completely non-functional. I also can't modify the toolbars under Windows 98, but I can do that in XP if necessary as I have a dual boot system. We need the KernelEx devs to add the necessary functions to user.exe if possible! My user.exe is version 4.10.0.2233.

I decided eventually to just stick with update 31! I'll wait and hope that KernelEx is eventually updated to support later versions of Java 6, or indeed Java 7.

Sorry Dave, I can't remember what I deleted to bypass digital signature check thing. You're on your own, good luck. No problem. If I do manage to find out what's wrong, I'll let you know!

Thanks again loblo. I tried installing with the original msi file and your modified cab file, and as expected I got an error message about the cab file not being digitally signed. I've tried to compare your modified msi file with the original msi file, using Orca, but I'm having trouble spotting any differences! Could you tell me exactly what you changed in the msi file? Thanks, Dave.

Thanks loblo. Just wanted to report that your modified version will not install on Windows XP either. It does exactly the same thing with the same error logs, so it's not a Windows 98 or KernelEx problem. I suspect something is amiss with your modified installer file. I'll have a look at it with Orca and see if I can spot anything wrong. Presumably it did install on your system OK?

Hi loblo. I've just tried installing your modified version of Java 6 update 32, and it's failing all the time. It just rolls back and says the install could not be completed and please try later. It's not getting as far as writing any files to the disk. There are no messages from the installer to say why it's failed, but in the Windows Temp folder, the java_install_reg.log says - -- QueryCurMSIValue: Open failed. -- Exec: QueryCurMSIValue(INSTALLDIR) failed. The jusched.log says - Sat Jun 09 13:59:13 2012 :: MSICheckPendingFileRenameOperations: RegOpenKeyEx() failed with ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND: 2, Error Code: 0 And the msievent.log just says - 09/06/12 13:59:20 (Info ) Product: Java 6 Update 32 -- Installation operation failed. Any idea what's going wrong? I've tried installing to the default folder and to a custom folder with the same result. I also uninstalled the previous version and cleaned out all its files and registry entries. I have the most recent version of KernelEx installed, and Java 6 update 31 installs and works fine. Thanks, Dave.

Oh well, I guess I'll have to stick with Java 6 on Windows 98 then. Very bad news about Opera 12, I hope some way around this can be found once it's released and we know how bad the problem actually is in the final version. I really don't want to have to use two different versions of Opera on my two operating systems!

Has anyone got Java 7 runtime to work in Windows 98 with KernelEx? I've tried using the normal method I've been using for installing Java 6 runtimes and I'm getting a "cannot unpack rt" message, followed by error messages about two dlls, msvcr100.dll and jvm.dll. I've tried applying KEx compatibility settings for 2000 and XP to both of them but no joy.

Thanks. Let's hope!

Oh dear, that is very bad news! Opera would be completely useless to me too without the plugins working. I really hope the KernelEx guys can fix this before the release of Opera 12.

Confirmed here. As a matter of interest (sorry if this has already been stated) has anyone tried the beta version of Opera 12 on Windows 98 with KEx? I'm awaiting its release with some apprehension and trepidation that it will no longer work.

Yes I can disable legacy USB support in the BIOS, but the pen drive isn't then detected of course. There are no USB speed adjustment options. Sorry, you've lost me! None of those file exist on my system.

This is the relevant section from my motherboard manual - The Intel E7505 chipset is a high-performance chipset with a performance and feature-set designed dual processor servers. The E7505 chipset consists of three major components: the Memory Controller Hub (MCH), the I/O Controller Hub 4 (ICH4) and the PCI-X 64-bit Hub 2.0 (P64H2). The MCH has four hub interfaces, one to communicate with the ICH4 and three for high-speed I/O communications. The MCH employs a 144-bit wide memory bus for a DDR-266 memory interface, which provides a total bandwidth of 4.27 GB/s. The ICH4 interface is a 266 MB/sec point-to-point connection using an 8-bit wide, 66 MHz base clock at a 4x data transfer rate. The P64H2 interface is a 1 GB/s point-to-point connection using a 16- bit wide, 66 MHz base clock at an 8x data transfer rate. The ICH4 I/O Controller Hub provides various integrated functions, including a two-channel Ultra ATA/100 bus master IDE controller, USB 2.0 host controllers, an integrated LAN controller, a System Management Bus controller and an AC'97 compliant interface. The P64H2 PCI-X Hub provides a 16-bit connection to the MCH for highperformance IO capability and two independent 64-bit PCI-X interfaces. I was a bit surprised to find that it does actually mention USB 2.0 controllers, but presumably that doesn't necessarily mean that it would use USB 2.0 if booting from a USB device. It could just mean that it has support for USB 2.0 when used with a suitable operating system. If it is already using USB 2.0 then presumably it's already working as well as it's ever going to do!

Thanks guys! Well I do have it working again, just rather slowly. I'm pretty sure my motherboard would only be natively USB 1 as it dates from 2003. If it's possible to get USB 2 speeds out of it in any way that would be good, if only that it might improve the stability of Windows 98 when running from the pen drive. The guy who designed Plop does say in response to a forum query about this that he was considering releasing a driver that gave read and write access for this specific configuration only (because of the need to be able to fit it all on a floppy disk) but that was written back in 2009, so I assume it's never happened. I also looked here as it was referenced in the same forum, and I did download the package, but I'm afraid my eyes glazed over when I started looking at the documentation, and I never determined whether there was anything there that would help with this.

I see absolutely no problem with having to install MDAC separately. Please don't delay the release of the final build just to resolve this "problem", as it's easily worked around!

OK, I've re-prepared the drive using the RM tool, copied my backup to it, and I now have a working bootable pen drive again, which will boot to Windows 98! I guess that the HP and RM utilities must do something to the drive which Plop undid, and we just weren't able to redo it, whatever it was! Incidentally it's no longer triggering the XP AutoPlay routine when I insert it, which must mean something. I've tried again booting with the Plop floppy disk, and accessing the pen drive using its driver. Unfortunately, this is just producing the write failure error message again. It boots fine without Plop, but won't boot with it. I does look to me as if the Plop USB driver does indeed make the drive read only, in which case we were onto a loser with it right from the start! Any other options for USB 2.0 in this scenario?

Hi again jaclaz, I didn't realise you had been away. I have downloaded and installed RMPrepUSB 2.1.630 (not the beta version) ready to be deployed if necessary. I tried den's latest MBR file, and sorry to report it's made no difference. It still gives "OS not found" if I try and boot directly, and via Plop it will only go to the command prompt without an immediate write error. I noticed this time that if I do boot to the command prompt with it, I cannot access my system drive (normally drive C: of course, but in this case drive D:). I can access all the other drives fine, but with drive D: although I can get to a D:> prompt, if I try and actually access the drive I get the error message "Invalid Media Type Reading Drive D". Very strange. I get the write error on the C: drive again if I try and copy anything to it from one of the dives I can access. I'm beginning to think that jaclaz is right, and we're running out of options to actually fix this, educational though it has been, and maybe it is time to just reformat the pen drive, copy my backup to it, and hopefully then be able to boot to Windows 98 from it as before. What do you reckon den?