Dave-H

As a longtime Opera fan, I want to always use the latest versions and keep them working on the Windows 98 side of my machine, and I'm using 11.51 with KernelEx with no problems apart from a few minor cosmetic ones. All functionality is fine and it's very fast indeed.

Mines is the rloew patched version. Ah, thanks. What was the patch for? Would there be any advantage to me using that version instead of the one I have?

Can't help with creating an installer I'm afraid, but just thought I'd mention that my version of KERNEL32.DLL is 4.10.0.2226, which looks later than the one quoted.

That's exactly what soporific's Autopatcher was. Unfortunately it hasn't been updated for several years now.

Of course not, although Microsoft do seem to be now doing their best to finally sweep it under the carpet. There's still a huge amount of information on the MS site relating to Windows 98 though, even though the Windows Update service for it has been withdrawn. Like any OS, Windows 98 will only truly die when there is no computer left in the world running it, and that's a very long way away yet!

Thanks, that works! I can now open the iuhist file in IE, but I need to find a (preferably free) program that will convert it to an html file that's more readable. I've found a couple but they aren't free and the demo versions won't convert the whole file. I don't really want to buy the program just to use it once only! I really wish I'd saved the whole Windows Update 4 site, but of course I didn't know that it was going to be shut down without warning!

Well I got another response from MS Support. "Dear Dave, Thank you for your reply. I am sorry to inform you that Windows Update 4 including security updates for Windows® 98 has been withdrawn. Please visit the following website for more information: http://support.microsoft.com/ph/1139 If you have any more questions please contact our Customer Services team on 0844 800 2400. The lines are open from 8am to 6pm, Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays or please reply to this email Many thanks for contacting us......." So that's it then, it's definitely been permanently withdrawn. I guess that we were lucky that it stayed on-line for a full five years after Windows 98/ME support ended! If anyone isn't aware, you can tidy things up by setting the "NoWindowsUpdate" setting at "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer" to "0". This will remove the Windows Update entry from Start Menu>Settings and from the IE Tools menu. One thing I would like to be able to still do is open my updates history file properly in IE6. If I try and open my "iuhist.xml" in IE6, it doesn't display, because it seems to need a file called "resultschema.xml", which is normally downloaded from the Windows Update site. Of course this no longer happens, and I don't have this file anywhere on my system. Does anyone still have a version of this file, (perhaps even still in your IE6 cache)? If so, if it's possible to let me have a copy I would be very grateful.

Indeed it does! If you're still using Opera, are you aware that you can re-enable javascript on a site by site basis? This would enable you to still use js on sites that are unusable without it.

Thanks.

This is off-topic, but just very quickly Rudolph, is this patch for Windows 9x only, or will it enable me to generate files over 4 GB on Windows XP with FAT32 drives?

I find it useful to be able to repair my XP installation using Windows 98 (and occasionally vice versa) mainly as it allows complete access to system files without constant file locking problems. And yes, there is a "fun factor" too! I still have my original 1993 PC, with Windows 95 and NT 3.51 on it dual boot. I play with it, but I wouldn't use it for anything serious!

For what it's worth, Windows 98SE is blisteringly fast and totally stable on my dual boot system. Web performance (using Opera 11.51 with KernelEx) is extremely fast, there is no difference in fact from surfing on Windows XP. I do have broadband of course, and a reasonably good graphics card (ATI Radeon X-850 AGP, which is probably the best I'll do on my present motherboard.) As far as I'm concerned Windows 98SE is far from dead, although one has to accept now that there is a lot of modern software which will just not run on it, so I would never say that anyone should use it exclusively. It's very useful as a second OS on a dual boot system however.

Well, I got a reply back from Windows Update support, but I'm afraid that as I expected it's a pretty stock one. "Dear Dave, Thank you for your email about issues accessing updates for Windows® 98. Please accept my apologies for the delay. I am sorry to inform you that the assisted support for Windows 98 has expired as the product is out of support lifecycle. Please refer to the following web link for information on support lifecycle; http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/ Alternatively, Please visit the following website to post your query and one of our Microsoft Valued Professionals will be able to help you with an answer. http://social.answers.microsoft.com Also, I would like to assure you that we do consider your feedback to be extremely valuable as it helps us to improve the products and service that we offer. With this in mind I will make sure that your feedback is passed to the appropriate department for their consideration. If you have any more questions please contact our Customer Services team on 0844 800 2400. The lines are open from 8am to 6pm, Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays or please reply to this email Many thanks for contacting us Kind regards........" Anyway, I replied asking for a definite answer as to whether Windows Update v4 has now been permanently switched off or not. I'm not holding my breath for a response! I do wonder if it's significant that this seems to have happened exactly five years after support for Windows 98 ended. Maybe it was in the small print somewhere that updates would only be available via Windows Update for another five years.

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..........