Dave-H

I'm wondering Sfor, does your problem happen with .htm files as well as .html and .https files? I ask because your registry entries don't show any data for .htm files. I don't have an entry for .https files, but I do for .htm and .html files, and they are both of type "Opera.HTML" The entry for that, which is generated by Opera of course is - REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Opera.HTML] @="HTML Document" "EditFlags"=dword:00000000 "BrowserFlags"=dword:00000008 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Opera.HTML\ScriptHostEncode] @="{0CF774D0-F077-11D1-B1BC-00C04F86C324}" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Opera.HTML\shell] @="" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Opera.HTML\shell\Edit] @="&Edit" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Opera.HTML\shell\Edit\command] @="\"C:\\Program Files\\Office XP\\Office10\\msohtmed.exe\" %1" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Opera.HTML\shell\open] [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Opera.HTML\shell\open\command] @="C:\\Program Files\\OPERA\\OPERA.EXE \"%1\"" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Opera.HTML\shell\open\ddeexec] @="\"%1\"" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Opera.HTML\shell\open\ddeexec\Application] @="Opera" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Opera.HTML\shell\open\ddeexec\Topic] @="WWW_OpenURL" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Opera.HTML\shell\Open in Internet Explorer] "EditFlags"=hex:01,00,00,00 @="Open in Internet Explorer" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Opera.HTML\shell\Open in Internet Explorer\command] @="C:\\Program Files\\Internet\\IEXPLORE.EXE %1" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Opera.HTML\shell\Print] @="&Print" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Opera.HTML\shell\Print\command] @="\"C:\\Program Files\\Office XP\\Office10\\msohtmed.exe\" /p %1" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Opera.HTML\ShellEx] [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Opera.HTML\ShellEx\IconHandler] @="{42042206-2D85-11D3-8CFF-005004838597}" Ignore the entry for Internet Explorer, I just added that manually so I can right click and choose to open the file in IE instead of Opera if I want to. The Office XP entry was put there by Office XP itself! Apart from the times when Opera is a bit too slow starting up, and opens with a blank page, this always works. If I double click on an htm or html file in Windows Explorer, or on a link say in an e-mail, Opera opens and displays the page as it should do. Although it sounds a bit drastic, I would uninstall Opera, and go through and delete manually all registry entries referring to it if any remain. Then make IE your default browser, assuming that you have it, and make sure that works with the file associations as it should. Then reinstall Opera and make that the default browser and see if it behaves any better.

Sorry for the misunderstanding(s) Sfor! If when you click a web link Opera opens but doesn't display the page, it sounds like it's not recognising the "%1" bit of the command. I have that happen sometimes, but it's usually (I think) because my installation of Opera (9.27 Build 8841) takes a long time to open up when running on Windows 98. It's much faster on Windows 2000 (dual boot). It's almost as if the fact that Opera is taking so long to load is causing the command to be forgotten somehow! How long does it take the Opera GUI to appear when you run it? If it's longer than 5 seconds this could be the problem. I found it was greatly improved after I emptied the Opera cache (Tools>Preference Settings>Advanced>History>Empty Now). If that helps, try setting the cache size to no more that 50MB or the problem will quickly come back. I queried this a lot on the Opera user forums, but never got a satisfactory answer.

Ah, OK. My equivalent of those keys look like this - REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http\shell\open] [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http\shell\open\command] @="\"C:\\Program Files\\Opera\\Opera.exe\"" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http\shell\open\ddeexec] @="\"%1\"" "NoActivateHandler"="" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http\shell\open\ddeexec\Application] @="Opera" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http\shell\open\ddeexec\Topic] @="WWW_OpenURL" REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\https\shell\open] [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\https\shell\open\command] @="\"C:\\Program Files\\Opera\\Opera.exe\"" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\https\shell\open\ddeexec] @="\"%1\"" "NoActivateHandler"="" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\https\shell\open\ddeexec\Application] @="Opera" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\https\shell\open\ddeexec\Topic] @="WWW_OpenURL" It uses the DDE function, which yours doesn't seem to be doing.

I agree. If you're actually having problems with drive letter assignments, or are doing a new installation, then using the modified IO.SYS is probably a good idea. Otherwise, you need to be careful and be aware that the drive letters you're used to having can get altered by it and you may need to restore the original version to correct this.

I didn't assign specific letters with fdisk. What I probably did (and this is a very long time ago now so my memory is hazy!) was to only connect the main hard disk to the system, partition it into two partitions, one of which was primary and made active. That became the C: drive and the other partition the D: drive. I then added the other two disks to the system one by one, with single full capacity partitions. They became E: and F: You are probably right that they are in fact logical volumes inside extended partitions. I wasn't aware at the time that I was creating a non-standard configuration! Accepting that my configuration is non-standard, why would that mean that changing the IO.SYS file would rearrange the drive letters (presumably to what would have been the standard configuration.) Are the drive letter assignments actually stored in IO.SYS? That would certainly explain it.

Yeah Ive found that too. I have the same problem I think with the Adobe Reader, as when I open a pdf file I see a message at the top right hand corner that says update adobe reader, when I click on this I get an Adobe update page, when I select Windows 98 and hit go nothing updates. Do you know which version was last working for 98 S.E? I think that Acrobat 6.0.5 is the last version to officially support Windows 98SE, but I believe some people have had success with version 7, but not version 8. There is a very good and useful sticky thread at the top of the forum which lists the last versions of many pieces of software that officially support Windows 98.

Well, NO. Any hard drive IS partitioned, at least with ONE partition. Of course, I should have said that the drives in question are single partitions on separate physical disks! Booted from a floppy and the drive letters remained the same, with the addition of a RAM drive G: My two DVD drives, normally G: and H: became H: and I: as you would expect. It's so long ago now, but I assigned the drives in DOS using fdisk, and it may well be that to get them the way I wanted them I had to physically disconnect drives so they weren't visible to fdisk. That may have been the way that I got the extended partition on the first disk to be D: I do remember that I had to reassign them in Windows 2000 to get the letters the same as in Windows 98, but at least that's relatively easy to do!

I certainly only have one primary partition, which is the boot drive C: This was the only drive not relabelled when I replaced the IO.SYS file. D: is indeed a logical volume inside an extended partition, on the same physical disk as the C: drive. The other two drives are not partitioned. All drives are all FAT32 as they have to be for access under Windows 98 of course.

Thanks for that info, I was having the same problems with shockwave, but I installed the version you rolled back to and hey presto it installed and works when visiting the Adobe test page. Glad you got it working! I really do wish that software manufacturers would make it clear what operating systems their products do or don't support. Adobe did not make it clear in this case, and they're not alone in this. All software download pages should make it clear which OSs the thing runs on, and should also give links for the latest version that does run on other OSs. You do get the impression now on many download sites that if you run any Windows version before XP SP2 you don't exist any more!

Works OK for me. My registry entry is slightly different from that quoted, this may by significant, I don't know. REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Opera.HTML\shell\open\command] @="C:\\PROGRAM FILES\\OPERA\\OPERA.EXE \"%1\""

Could you please post how your Hard drive is partitioned and how letters were before and after using the patched files? FYI, though unrelated: Letter Assigner: http://www.v72735.f2s.com/LetAssig/ jaclaz My main drive is partitioned into C: (Windows 98SE and System drive) and D: (Windows 2000 drive) I also have a separate archive drive E:, and a removable EIDE drive F: If I remember correctly, C: stayed the same, E: became D:, F: became E: I can't remember what happened to D:! Very worrying at the time, but fortunately putting the original IO.SYS file back fixed it! I was I thought facing the horror of using fdisk, which always frightens me to death!

I just tried this modified IO.SYS file on my Win98SE system, and it completely rearranged my drive letters, fortunately not including drive C:! Beware..............

I've only ever exported and imported single keys, or occasionally blocks of keys relating to a single application. One of the things with a dual boot system is that applications which are installed on both systems don't have their setting changes mirrored on the other OS if they store them in the registry, and this procedure overcomes that. In that respect, INI files stored in the application's own folder do have their advantages! I always look at the keys' contents in Notepad and amend any incompatible paths etc. before I import them into the other OS! I've never had a problem yet (touch wood!) The only problem I've noticed with NREGEDIT is that it often does not write valid numerical DWORD values in Win2K. They look OK in NREGEDIT but don't work, and when viewed in REGEDIT it says "invalid DWORD value" and you have to re-enter it using that. Always works fine in Win98. Yes, that is a great resource!

I think this may be an insoluble problem if that msi package really does need version 3 of the Windows Installer. I don't think anyone has hacked MSI 3 to work on Windows 98.

To reinforce what Charlotte has quite rightly said, don't even think about doing this! If you want to copy settings for a particular piece of software from one OS to the other just export and import the section for that application. Copying the whole lot across will be a recipe for disaster as there will surely be a huge number of incompatible paths at very least. Remember that this will include all your Windows OS settings! While we're on this subject, I have a dual boot Windows 98SE and Windows 2000 system, and I have often copied registry settings from one to the other by exporting and importing keys. I have never run across any compatibility problems with the regisrty files. Are the files in the same format on W98SE and W2K and different on XP? I usually use the Norton registry editor to do this rather than the MS regedit.

I have read in several places on the web that the boot time of Windows 2000 can be improved by using the ntldr file from Windows XP on a Windows 2000 system. I have tried this, and it doesn't work for me. I assume that this is because my Windows 2000 installation is not standard. My Windows 2000 system files are in D:\WIN-NT not C:\WINNT as would be standard. Is there any way around this? I looked at the XP ntldr file with a hex editor, and did find references to the path of the OS system files. If I could edit this to match my system presumably it might then work, but I don't know how to do this safely. If anyone can help with this I would be very grateful, as the slow start-up of Windows 2000 has always annoyed me, although I very much like everything else about the OS, and want to keep using it! Thanks, Dave.

Great news p7s7x9! So glad that you sorted it out, and glad to be of help. That's what these forums are all about!

If you don't have the driver disks for your sound card and LAN card, you can probably download the drivers from the web (using another computer of course!) You do need to know what make and model they are of course! If they are separate cards and not part of the motherboard, you'll probably find this information printed somewhere on the cards themselves. Are either or both or none of the cards are listed in your Device Manager?

Does your LAN card show up in Device Manager? If not, then it hasn't been detected either, along with your sound card! If you have the driver disks for the sound card and LAN card, just install them manually.

You certainly could restore an earlier version of the system files using scanreg as stated. However, you will lose any other information recently written into the registry if you do that. Try opening system.ini in notepad (or DOS edit if you can't actually start Windows.) Find the entries for the queried files and disable them by putting a semi-colon at the start of the lines that include them. That should make the boot error messages go away, but you will then have to investigate whether your network facilites are working properly, or at all.

Thanks so much ShadeTreeLee for your explanation about the registry entries for file associations. I've wondered before where the "auto_file" entries came from and what their significance is. Now I know! Just to amuse you, I was on the phone to MS Technical Support some years ago, about a Windows 2000 issue in fact, and we got to looking at file associations. I asked him about the "auto_file" entries, and he was adamant that he'd never come across them before, and they couldn't have beeen generated by Windows! I have also discovered that the spurious truncated entries in the "open with" dialogue do go away if you put quotes aroud the paths to the executables if they contain spaces. You do need them round the "%1" as well, as stated. The other fix is to replace the entry in the registry using the 8 character DOS names of the folders, which never contain spaces of course. That works fine too.

I haven't tried that because I don't have KernelEx installed (but I may well try it one day). Unfortunately I've now found anyway that the OS compatibility problem with recent versions of the Shockwave Player is more fundamental than I thought. In fact my installation on Windows 2000 doesn't work properly either I've now found! Although it appeared to install OK, and works on Adobe's test page, if I actually try and use in on any real content, it asks to download additional components, but the installation crashes with the "cannot load DLL library system32/kernel32.dll (GetSystemWow64DirectoryA) The procedure could not be found" error message, as quoted in the Adobe forums. This is presumably an entry point in kernel32.dll which exists in XP and Vista, but doesn't exist in the version used in Windows 2000, and therefore almost certainly won't exist in the Windows 98 version either. KernelEx may fix this of course, and I'd be interested to know if that is actually the case from someone who has got it installed. It looks as if Adobe have broken compatibility with Windows 2000 and Windows 98 in Shockwave version 11, which is not something that they will now do anything about I expect as they'll just bring out the old line about them being obsolete operating systems. Incidentally Shockwave version 10.3.0.024 gave exactly the same problem for me on Windows 2000 when I tried it, so it's the last release of version 10 as well as version 11 which no longer works except in XP and Vista. I've now rolled back to version 10.2.0.023, which works perfectly on Windows 2000 and Windows 98. Presumably as time goes on it will become increasingly incompatible with new content though.

I'm having a problem getting this to work too. The posts on the Adobe forum seem to relate mainly to problems with Windows 2000. I have a dual boot machine with Windows 2000 SP4 and Windows 98SE, and have had no problem getting Shockwave 11 to work on Windows 2000. It installed fine and works fine in IE, Opera, and Firefox. I cannot get it to work on Windows 98 though! The standalone full installer seems to work on Windows 98 fine. It seems to install and puts all the necessary files in the right places and writes at least some of the necessary registry keys (I can tell this by comparing with the Windows 2000 installation.) However, if I go the the Adobe test page using IE, the pop-up comes up asking me if I want to install the ActiveX code for Shockwave 11. If I say yes, it runs then immediately crashes. On Opera I just get a blank white area where the plug-in should be (I don't have Firefox installed on Windows 98.) It appears what's happening is that the installer is trying to run a program called "swdnld.exe", which will not run on Windows 98. It just crashes straight away if you try to run it, even in Safe Mode. I have tried making the Windows 98 installation exactly the same as the Windows 2000 installation, checking that all the files are present in the correct folders, and copying registry keys from one OS to the other. The ActiveX files are present in the "Downloaded Program Files" folder, and the ActiveX control is listed in the "Objects" list in the Internet Settings, and appears to be installed correctly. So why is the system still asking me to download and install the ActiveX control when I visit a Shockwave site? There must be one vital piece of the jigsaw missing, but I can't identify what it is. Has anyone any ideas? Until I can get past that hurdle, I can't tell if the Shockwave system really is working or not. The previous version is completely removed BTW, I did a normal uninstall, and used Adobe's removal tool, and then I manually purged any remaining files and any remaining references to it in the registry.

Soporific, I replied to your two PMs from earlier today, and apart from the fact that I couldn't find any way to attach files to the message, when I looked in my "sent items" box it appears to be an empty message! I don't know WTF is going on with this, did you get the message OK? Cheers, Dave.

Dave-H, if you installed Revolutions Pack 7.11 AND the AP environment space fix, you will find AP doesn't load. The problem is due to the SHELL command in CONFIG.SYS -- click START then RUN and type in SYSEDIT in the run dialog box and hit enter. Your system files will come up -- in CONFIG.SYS find this line: SHELL=COMMAND.COM /E:4096 /P and delete it. If you subsequently find that you needed the fix in order for AP to work properly then we will need to make a special AUTOEXEC.BAT file for you to use. Let me know if this is the case. Sop. Hi Sop, thanks for the quick reply! Unfortunately, I still haven't resolved the problem. I have never used Revolutions Pack BTW. I tried deleting the SHELL= line from my config.sys as you suggested. Autopatcher then kept running, and talked me through the environment space fix. That all seemed to go OK, but after the re-boot it was exactly as before, running AP just makes a DOS box pop up briefly and immediately close! I have checked config.sys, and the SHELL=COMMAND.COM /E:4096 /P line is there correctly, and the back-ups of config.sys are there OK in the C:\ root folder. As I said before, I had already manually made that modification to config.sys with no result, and it looks as if AP's automatic fixing procedure is just producing the same result. Any more ideas why if might not be running? As I said, it does run OK in Safe Mode, but not in normal mode, even with everything but explorer.exe shut down. Thanks, dave.