Dave-H

Sorry if this has been covered before, but I can't find anything directly relevant to the problem I'm having. I am using Windows 2000 SP4, and have until recently been using it for a long time with just a single user profile. Recently I decided to keep an unused profile as a sort of backup which I could use for testing and diagnostic purposes. I now have a profile called "Admin" (the test profile) and a profile called "Dave" (my normal profile). They are both members of the Administrators' Group. The Admin profile was originally a straight copy of the Dave profile, but has now become slightly different of course. There is no software or hardware that is installed on one profile and not the other. My problem happens if I try to switch profiles more than once. If I log on to either at startup, all is fine. If I log off and log on again to the same profile, all is fine. If I log off and log on to the other profile, all is fine. However, if I then try to log off, or restart, the desktop disappears, but insted of giving me back the logon screen, I just get left with a blank desktop with the mouse cursor, and that's it! No matter how long I leave it it never goes any further, and I have to do a forced hardware reboot. This often results in a forced disk check, but is otherwise then OK. Basically, the problem is that I can only log off and on again once. If I try to log off a second time, the system hangs. Anyone come across this one? I do have a lot of what I perceived to be un-necessary services disabled. Have I disabled one too many?

Sadly so at the moment, but there's an awful lot of kudos waiting for anyone who does manage to do it!

Well at least that explains why they weren't offered as ports for the modem! Try scanning for plug and play devices and see if they're now detected. I'm surprised that they haven't been already anyway. If that fails, try adding them manually using the Add Hardware wizard. If the COM ports are now in Device Manager, try the modem install again. With a bit of luck you might now be offered COM 1-4 as options. Try using COM 3 as that seems to be the norm for modems.

Welcome to the Board Richard! What are you actually trying to install? You say "updates". Do you mean MS updates? If you're trying to install other programs, is the install.exe or setup.exe file not showing on the installation disk(s), but other files are?

COM 3 is where my dial-up modem is connected. I think it shares resources with COM 1 IIRC. I'm a bit surprised that only the LPT1 port was offered to you by the setup. Are COM 1 and COM 2 present on your system in Device Manager?

Understood. Thanks for the explanation MDGx.

Hi MDGx, what has changed is that this topic is no longer a sticky in the Important Topics section of the Windows 9x Member Projects Forum. Indeed, that's what I was actually referring to as well!

Thanks MDGx, but I am still puzzled. As you say, the AutoPatcher thread is still in your "Important/Stickified/Pinned" topics list, but it used to also be in the "Important Topics" section at the top of the board. It was its removal from there that I was querying.

Thanks for the update soporific. Glad the project isn't dead. A new version once a year, even if it's only a cumulative update to a permanent final full version (Dec 2007?), would be very welcome. It's not just the patches, important though they are of course, it's the extra enhancements developed by those like yourself which I much appreciate. I realise that you can get most of them individually, often directly from their authors, but having them all in one package is a big advantage. BTW, while you're here, do you know if anyone has managed to modify the Windows 98 Explorer files so that "My Documents" appears at the top of the tree in the left hand pane, as it is on Windows 2000/XP? It has always really annoyed me that it's at the bottom. Why MS designed it like that I cannot understand! Thanks again. Dave.

Can anyone confirm whether this project is still alive? I am concerned that this thread has now been removed from the "sticky" topics on the board........

Here you go - http://rloew1.no-ip.com It's not free, but worth every penny in my opinion. (And no, I'm not a personal friend or relative of Rudolph, just a very satisfied customer!)

Thanks! Of course, it's no longer a "sticky", and has gone down onto page 2 because its last addition was back in February. I should have thought of that. But why isn't it a sticky any more? The other threads that are no longer stickys have been replaced with newer versions on the same or similar subjects. Is AutoPatcher for Windows 98 officially dead then? Say it ain't so!

MDGx, I see you've reorganised the "stickys", but what's happened to the Autopatcher thread? It seems to have just disappeared. Is it presumed dead?

Thanks erpdude8 and many apologies for not acknowledging this for so long! I have looked at the KB article, and as you say, it acknowledges the problem, but doesn't offer any fix. I've looked and cannot find the file for download anywhere. If it were possible for you to post it somewhere where I could grab it I'd be very grateful, as it doesn't seem to be available from MS through any normal mechanism. EDIT: Forget that, found it on the MDGx page, where I should have looked in the first place of course! LATER EDIT: Unfortunately tried it, and version 4.10.2223 still doesn't give me any processor information in the system properties tab, just like 4.10.2224. Just the memory is displayed. This may be because I am using Xeon processors. I'll stick with 4.10.2222, which at least gives a generic processor type display on my system.

Have you tried the MS Update site specifically for Office? http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/maincatalog.aspx It does use ActiveX as all MS update sites do, but if Windows Update works for you, Office Update should as well.

Well, now I am at home! I hit the registry with Regseeker, which found over 1000 errors, and an OLE Cleaner program which found over 200 errors! All well and good. The list was so long on Regseeker that I didn't study it all, just took out a few entries I spotted that I knew needed to be ignored. I then let it repair all the rest. I let the OLE Cleaner repair everything it found. I then ran the registry optimiser. On reboot, I got several error messages, mainly relating to services being unable to start. I also had nothing at all in the right hand panes of Windows Explorer, which was rather worrying! The registry cleaners had obviously been a bit over-enthusiastic! Fortunately, I had of course made a backup. I went into Windows 98 to look at the registry files' size, which I hadn't been able to do as Explorer wasn't working properly in Windows 2000! I was a bit disappointed to find that the size of the files hadn't actually changed all that much. The SYSTEM file had been 6.2MB, which had reduced to 6.07MB after I had removed the hardware device information for the unconnected devices. It had now reduced a bit more, but only to 5.18MB, nowhere near enough! Anyway, I restored the backup, and everything was back as before. What next I wonder..........

LOL! exactly to avoid meaning "use ONLY Wise Registry Cleaner" (or any other single app). Each app, besides a few simply not up-to-the-standard, has different ways to "look" at the Registry, and even a "very good" one may overlook, for any reason, what another finds and fixes in no time. jaclaz Point taken! I will try running the others on Windows 2000 when I get home! I'll let you know the results......

Not taken the wrong way at all jaclaz! I'm well aware now that my registry is a lot bigger than it should ideally be, the question is why. I have a history of registry size problems on Windows 98, which has only recently been resolved (see the "Puzzling Registry Size Issue" thread over on the Windows 98 forum) so I am well aware of registry cleaning and optimisation programs! In fact I already use Regseeker regularly on Windows 98, but haven't tried it on Windows 2000. I do use Wise Registry Cleaner on both OSs, and clean out all the redundant MRU information etc. I'm not sure about system configuration data though. Wise does check for invalid CLSIDs, but I'm not sure about invalid/obsolete hardware information. I do have another invalid CLSID checker which I have run too, but it didn't find much wrong. I do have an excellent system information utility that came with the HP software for my HP printer. That will list all the hardware device information in the registry and allow you to delete obsolete items. Anything that's not actually physically connected to the machine when it scans is shown with a yellow mark. I often delete them all, and as it's usually USB stuff, the system just puts them back if I subsequently reconnect the device(s) in the future. Unfortunately, having done all this, there never seems to be any big reduction in the size of the registry files, even after running the optimiser, which should remove any empty space. As I said, I have removed one of the ControlSets, which was marked as a "failed" one. That did produce a big drop in the SYSTEM file size, from over 9MB to its present size of 6.2MB. Good, but still not enough! I don't seem to be able to permanently delete any of the other ControlSets, as they all seem to be necessary and just get put back. I have CurrentControlSet, ControlSet01 which is the default, and ControlSet02 which is the "Last Good". I do back up my registry regularly. I totally agree that this is good practice anyway. I generally just use the backup feature in MSBackup, which is part of the routine to make a startup disk. Wise Registry Cleaner also has a backup facility for the whole registry, and I use that too after I've cleaned it. Is there anywhere I should be looking in the registry where a large chunk of unnecessary data might be sitting that the scanners aren't finding?

Perhaps then I can get Windows 98 to recognise both of my two physical processors too!

Well I've tried the Word 2003 Viewer and the Excel 2003 Viewer on Windows 98, and they both won't install, saying that I need a "later version of Windows". Maybe with KernelEx? I'm not too worried as the earlier versions seem to do fine. Just a bit strange that one of the three newer versions supports Windows 98 and the other two don't.

Thanks for the "heads up". Strange that Powerpoint Viewer 2003 claims to support Windows 98SE, but the Word and Excel 2003 viewers say they need at least Windows 2000 SP4 to work. Has anyone actually tried them under Windows 98?

Now that's just showing off!

Well my SYSTEM file is still 6.22MB, and that's after deleting one of the "ControlSets" that wasn't needed! I can't think of any other way to make it significantly smaller, as the ControlSets still left seem to all be necessary. My understanding is that the SYSTEM hive should only contain the information necessary for the computer to start. The number of software programs installed should not affect it, as their data is stored elsewhere (presumably in the "SOFTWARE" hive!) What is in SYSTEM is the hardware configuration data, including things like the details of every storage device that you've ever attached to the system, but I've tried going through that and deleting any redundant obsolete entries, and it actually make little or no difference to the file size, even after running a registry optimiser/compacter program on it.

Glad it worked for you Pavel! I tried using both of the two sets of startup files that you kindly gave me a link to, but neither worked. Just the usual "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt \WIN-NT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM" error message as soon as the system tried to start. How big is your system32\config\system file as a matter of interest?

I did try downloading and running the scrubber hotfix from MS, but it didn't make any noticeable difference to the size of my SYSTEM hive, but thanks for the suggestion. As I said on the "Puzzling Registry Size Issue" thread over on the Windows 98 forum, I'm amazed that this 16MB memory limitation during startup was perpetuated from Windows 98 to Windows 2000! It appears that it was finally addressed in Windows 2003, but there seems to be no way of porting that across to Windows 2000 installations.