Dave-H

Thanks for that. Actually I've now bitten the bullet and upgraded to Windows XP, so the problem has gone away! It's all useful stuff for anyone else with the same issue though, who may not be able or wish to upgrade. I did in fact install and try the Canon TWAIN driver, and as you surmised, it worked but wouldn't recognise my camera. It seems that Nikon never produced an equivalent package. I also looked at Cam2PC, but that didn't seem to do the trick either.

Indeed that sad day will all too soon be upon us. With the end of support for Windows 2000 that will be I assume the end of support for IE6 SP1 completely too, and I don't believe that SP2 will be very far behind...........

Well, the deed is done, and everything is getting straight. So far, I have no regrets whatsoever! I think I can even get my Windows Explorer folders looking like they did in 2000 again with a bit of hacking, which I wasn't expecting to be able to do. I thought I'd post one more time here just to say that the two Network Connections icons in Control Panel was due to the entry in the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ControlPanel\NameSpace producing one icon, and the cpl file producing the other! I removed the registry entry, and all was well. However I had to reinstall Windows again, for reasons I won't bore you all with, and the double icons came back! It must be a bug in Windows setup. Whether it's due to it being an update rather than a clean install I don't know. Just thought I'd mention the fix here in this thread in case anyone searches the forum for the same problem. At least all the observations will be in one place then. Now I really am heading for the XP forum! Cheers all, Dave. (I know it's a "hello" emoticon, but I'm using it as a "goodbye" one!)

Well, I found the cause of the WMI access problem! To my eternal shame, I eventually phoned MS about it, convinced that it had to be an OS configuration problem. I had to pay them too, which really hurt! Of course if I'd actually thought about it a bit more, I would have done myself exactly what they told me to do. As soon as I said it was all right in Safe Mode, they just told me to use msconfig to disable all non-MS services. I did this, and everything worked! Grrrrrrrr!! I then went through the process of elimination to find which service was causing the problem, and found to my great surprise that it was Windows Defender! Although this is a Microsoft program, its service isn't included as an MS service, presumably because it's not part of the OS. I uninstalled Windows Defender and reinstalled it, and everything came good. Boy was I kicking myself that I'd actually paid MS to tell me something that had I used any common sense I could have easily found out for myself! I was so convinced that it had to be a fundamental OS problem though, especially as it always worked fine after the first reboot after setup, when WD was running! It only failed after a subsequent reboot. I guess I'll never know why that was....... Anyway, all is now working, Windows/MS Update, Msinfo, and Remote Assistance, and the Network Connections folder is fine. I've still got two icons for it in Control Panel though, that's the next investigation! I'm going to the XP forum from now on for problems. I hope they're nice over there! Cheers, Dave.

I deleted the registry Control Panel namespace entry for the Network Connections window, and also deleted the cpl files. There seemed to be two of them, one called netsetup.cpl, and one called ncpa.cpl. I had to remove both of them before both the Network Connections icons disappeared from Control Panel. Needless to say, when I reinstalled Windows again they all came back, and I've got two Network Connections icons in Control Panel again! Surely this isn't normal? The two icons seem to do exactly the same thing! I've gradually resolved some of the outstanding problems, but one big one remains! The problem with MSInfo, the blank Network Connections folder, and the fact that I can't get Windows Update to work all seem to have the same root cause. Remote Assistance isn't working either. The system can't access the cimv2 namespace. Everywhere where it tries to do this, I just get an "Access Denied" message. I've now reinstalled Windows XP twice, and the same thing happens every time. After setup completes, the first time Windows boots up everything works fine. The Network Connections window is populated, MSInfo works, Windows Update works, Remote Assistance works. All is fine until I reboot, then everything stops working again! Logging off and on doesn't cause this problem, only a reboot does. I've searched and searched about this, and tried every resolution offered, but nothing fixes it. It looks like a permissions problem, but there is only the Administrator and Guest account on the machine. The Guest account is turned off, and I am the default Administrator, so why can't I access these things!

There are several utilities available to extract the files from installers. I use Universal Extractor, which I've always found works pretty well. http://www.softpedia.com/get/Compression-t...Extractor.shtml Download this, and open the QuickTime installer file with it. It will extract all the component files into a folder, including the msi installer files.

Hi again guys! Some progress made. I checked the name of the Administrator account in all the places mentioned, and it was still "Dave"! Why it comes up as "Administrator" on the login screen still, and the start menu still says "Log off Administrator" I have no idea, very odd as it certainly wasn't like that on 2000. Anyway I now have the system set to log on automatically anyway and I've got my familiar old shut-down screen back. I found an option in "User Accounts" in Control Panel called "Change the way users log on or off". This allows you to turn off the welcome screen, and that seemed to do the trick. Still no joy with the Network Connections window. The two icons for it in control panel I think are being caused by there being a .cpl file and an entry in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ControlPanel\NameSpace referring to the Network Connections applet. Could someone with XP tell me which of these is the correct one and I'll try deleting the other. Incidentally, the two icons produce different tooltips when you hover over them. One says "Connects to other computers, networks, and the internet" and the other says "Configures network software". This might also give a clue as to which one is the rogue imposter! Another couple of issues (I don't want to take this to the XP forum until I've at least resolved problems stemming from the upgrade) are that WMI isn't working, and Windows Update isn't working either. If I try and use MSInfo none of it works, and I just get a message saying "Windows Management files may be moved or missing". If I try and use MS Update or Windows Update, I get error 0x800A0046. I've been through all the steps suggested to resolve this error, cleared all my cache and cookies, but no joy. Anyone any quick fixes for either of these?! Den, I have still got all my backups of the old system files. The only thing I foolishly forgot to do was backup the files on C:\, the root of the system drive. I hope I won't need them......... Cheers, Dave.

Well, the deed has been done! It seemed to take ages, but I was impressed with the fact that XP setup did manage to preserve most of my customised settings from Windows 2000. All of this is now something for the XP forum of course, but before I sign this thread off and start loads more in that forum(!) there are just a couple of anomalies I'd like a view on. One thing that surprised me is that the XP start-up and shut-down screens don't look the same as they did when I used XP Pro at work. At work they looked pretty much the same as the Windows 2000 ones, but on my new installation, they look like the XP Home ones. I've got all the themes set to classic, as I had at work, but that has not changed. Anyone any idea why? It doesn't say "Professional" on the XP opening splash screen, which I'm sure it did at work. The only thing that didn't work when I restarted was my network adapter, but that was because setup couldn't find a file that in fact wasn't on the system. I reinstalled the drivers and everything appeared to be fine, but I still couldn't connect to the internet! The Network Connections window was blank, no icons in it. It should have had two old dial-up connections and my ethernet connection in it. There was also two Network Connections icons in the Control Panel, both of which seemed to do the same thing, bring up the empty window. Not looking good! Anyway, after a lot of fruitless investigation, I ran setup again. This time there were no error messages, the network adapter was fine, and the NC window was populated. After a bit of juggling, I got the connection to work. Still two icons in Control Panel though. Re-booted, and the windows was blank again, although the connection is still working! Any ideas anyone? If I refresh the window it says it can't create icons and to check that the Network Connections service is running. It is. Another funny is that I don't like being called "Administrator"! I changed the user name for the administrator account to "Dave" on Windows 2000, but that hasn't been replicated. I can't find where to change it in Windows XP. The help files refer to an "advanced" tab on the User Accounts applet, which I expect is where this option will be, but the advanced tab isn't there! Any pointers on any of this much appreciated, and I promise I'll go the XP forum afterwards! Cheers, Dave.

Well, my OEM disk arrived, and of course I couldn't do an upgrade with it, as you rightly warned me! Annoyingly, the firm I bought it from wouldn't take it back either. They don't have retail versions anyway, and they wouldn't refund my money as I had opened the package to check the installation instructions, even though I hadn't actually opened the packaging of the disk itself. Apparently people order these cheap(er) OEM versions just to get the product code, and they're not interested in the actual disk. Presumably this is so they can activate illegal copies. You can only get a refund if the package is returned untouched exactly as received. I'll remember that in future! Anyway, I've now got a proper retail version from another supplier. What I ordered was an upgrade version, but what has arrived is actually a full version as far as I can see, in that doesn't need an upgradable version of Windows to be already present on the machine. So, here goes. Wish me luck!

I assume you've seen this Charlotte. http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=334421 In fact you may even have posted to it under another name, but it looks as if you're not alone! I've never seen this problem myself under Windows 98 or Windows 2000, perhaps I'm one of the lucky ones..... Cheers, Dave.

Reference to the Knowledge Base in Opera support gives a different view at http://www.opera.com/support/kb/view/375 I have, so far as I can remember, always had Enable Java unchecked in all my years of using Opera and have never come across the need to enable it. There again I don't have problems with Opera. HTH Ah, I stand corrected! I must have mis-understood something I read ages ago about Opera and Java. I think what I said about the plugins still applies though.

****, I obviously didn't do enough research! The copy I've ordered is definitely an unbranded OEM copy. I'll wait until it arrives and see what the installation instructions that supposedly come with it say. If I can't do an upgrade, which is what I really want to do, I'll see if the company I bought it from will swap it for a full version. I don't mind paying the extra price. Thanks submix8c for warning me.

Opera has never needed the Sun Java Runtime to be installed, it has its own Java support built in. I think that has always been the case, at least back to version 7. They say that you should always remove any references to Java plugins in the plugins list (Tools>Advanced>Plug-ins), as they can cause conflicts. You can do that by adding them to plugin-ignore.ini.

Thanks guys! Still waiting for that disk to arrive, but the time is near.......... I was a bit worried that submix8c said that I had to do a clean install. I know that's what you've all recommended that I do anyway, but I would like to try an upgrade install first. Surely I can always do a new clean install later if I'm not happy with the results of that. Looking here it does appear that you can do an upgrade install from Windows 2000 to XP Professional, but not to XP Home Edition. As I said, I need XP Pro anyway as I have a dual processor machine and that isn't supported by XP Home AFAIK. Will keep you updated! Cheers, Dave.

Happy New Year everyone! I've been using Windows 2000 ever since it was first released, and am very attached to it as an operating system. However, I feel that the time has come for me to seriously consider getting rid of it. It's not just because the security updates will cease this summer, although that is a factor. I'm just getting increasingly frustrated that so many software writers will not now allow their latest versions to work on it. So, my first decision was what should I go for if I do bite the bullet and upgrade? I dual boot with Windows 98SE, which I have vowed never to abandon, so going for a non-Microsoft OS didn't seem to be a sensible course. Vista was a non-starter as far as I could see, so the choice was between Windows 7 or trying to get hold of a copy of XP. I had used XP for several years at work before I retired, so I was well familiar with it. Windows 7 looked a bit too much like an "upgrade too far". As well as the fact that it's brand new, and not even on its first service pack yet, and therefore still likely to be full of "issues", I was rather put off by the fact that it apparently won't install on a FAT32 drive. I need to keep FAT32 for compatibility with Windows 98, and although I gather that there are ways around this, it did seem to be a bit of an un-necessary complication to the upgrade. Even if I did get it to work on a FAT32 drive, how well would it coexist with Windows 98? Also, you can't do an upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows 7 it seems, presumably because they are so different. You have to do a clean install, which means rebuilding all the software on the computer, not something I relish the thought of, and that's even before any problems caused by hardware driver incompatibilities with Windows 7! Windows XP does seem like the best bet. I have always thought that the fact that there was such a huge gap in between XP being released and Vista being released was down to the fact that MS pretty much got it right with XP, and were flailing around a bit trying to find justification for replacing it. Poor old Windows 2000, it barely had a year between being released and being replaced! Vista (and Windows 7) look to me that they don't offer a whole lot more fundamentally than XP. All they seem to have done is make it look prettier (although that's a matter of opinion!) and added a load of fancy effects to the GUI which I for one have zero interest in. There's not obviously much fundamentally new "under the hood" technology there unless someone can tell me otherwise. Most new computing technologies that have come in the last ten years seem to be supported by XP anyway. So, I've managed to find a brand new OEM copy of Windows XP Pro (I need that as I have a dual processor motherboard) with the (latest and I assume last) SP3 updates included. All legal I hasten to add! When it arrives I will, with some trepidation, put the disk in my drive and run setup! Goodbye Windows 2000, you served me long and faithfully. The thing I will really miss on Windows 2000 are my customisations. I'm assuming that things like my appearance settings will be preserved, and I know from experience at work that I can make XP look pretty much the same as the look of 2000 I'm used to. One thing I do have however is a large number of customised shortcuts in the Windows Explorer windows, which allowed me to easily jump between my most used folders. I gather that the facility to do that (by editing the HTML templates) has been completely removed in XP and later systems. If anyone knows how to still do it, I'd be very grateful to know! I'll also miss the nice big preview thumbnails that I have for image and video files in Windows Explorer. I don't think the facility for video preview is there at all in XP, and as I do a lot of work with video files, that is going to be a real pain. IIRC the only image preview thumbnails in XP are tiny postage stamp things too, and that can't be changed. Again if anyone knows how to get any of this functionality back I'd love to know! Still, I suppose I am looking forward to being able to finally install the latest versions of most of my programs, without hacks! As I said elsewhere it's sad that with a few honourable exceptions like blackwingcat, few have tried to keep Windows 2000 alive, unlike Windows 98, which seems to have a whole community devoted to keeping it alive! I suppose that's because Windows 2000 was never a mass market consumer OS, so its domestic user base is very small. Anyway, enough rambling! Have I made the right decision? Dave.

Did you fix your multiple download tabs problem Charlotte?

Thanks for that no1none. I am familiar with Orca and have used it quite a few times to make msi files compatible with Windows 2000. Unfortunately that isn't the problem in this case, as the installer isn't an msi file. I used Universal Extractor (another great tool BTW) to extract the files from the installer, in an attempt to do a manual installation. This has come to nothing unfortunately, as I think there are probably just too many system file version dependencies.

Hope this will fix it Charlotte! http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=298527 BTW Opera 10.10 seems to be working fine under Windows 98SE on my machine. Opera's line now appears to be that they haven't consciously broken compatibility with any legacy operating systems, but they don't now guarantee that new versions will work properly under them. I assume that means that they don't now test new versions under Windows 98 (or 95). Cheers, Dave.

Well, thanks for the input jaclaz and decorso, but I think I'm on the point of giving up on this. To cut a very long story short, I've got as far as having new "Scanners & Cameras" icons in "My Computer" and Control Panel, which run and throw up a new window, which immediately closes again! There's nothing in it during the brief time that it's on screen either. If I run the wizard it just says that it can't find any devices, even though my scanner (which is detected fine by the system on Windows 98) is connected. More worryingly, the PTP system doesn't detect my camera as a working device using the Windows ME dlls. If I replace them with the XP versions, it does come up as a working device, but when I unplug it, about 30 seconds later (not straight away surprisingly) the system BSODs with a stop error. What I really need is an XP system to compare things like files and registry entries with, but unfortunately I don't have that luxury. As I think all I'll end up with is something that is compromising the stability of the system, and probably doesn't work properly anyway, I'll give it up as a bad job, unless anyone else has any suggestions. Still, it was worth a try! I really would like to try and get the system to work with the camera on Windows 98 though, but that's not for this forum! The trouble with Windows 2000 is that with a very few exceptions, like blackwingcat, people haven't tried to get later OS facilities working on it to any great extent, unlike Windows 98, where there seem to be loads of personal projects to keep Windows 98 working with later technologies. I assume this is because Windows 2000 was never a mass-market domestic OS, whereas Windows 98 was. Many more people used and still use 98 therefore than ever used 2000, which was mainly used in business environments. I'll never abandon Windows 98, but I do wonder sometimes whether I would be better off ditching 2000..........

Thanks Den! That's exactly what I have done, and it does seem to be OK. I was just a bit puzzled why it was deleted in the first place, especially as its "replacement" doesn't seem to work! I was wondering if anyone else using this patch could confirm this, or whether it's just an issue on my system.

I've been trying to get this to work in Windows 2000, another OS that never had WIA or PTP support. I've sort of given up on it, as I can't get it to function properly, even using XP files, but I have got it installed on Windows 98SE (dual boot machine) and I do have a couple of questions about that. It has installed and seems to work fine on Windows 98 of course, but one thing the installer did (it's in the inf file) was delete my sticpl.cpl file so I now have no applet for imaging devices in my Windows 98 Control Panel. What it has done is add an entry {E211B736-43FD-11D1-9EFB-0000F8757FCD} in the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ControlPanel\NameSpace. This is labelled "Scanners & Cameras". It's also in the equivalent "MyComputer" key, and has worked there, with an extra icon in "My Computer". It did the same thing in Windows 2000, and a new Scanners and Cameras applet appeared in the Windows 2000 Control Panel, as well as in "My Computer". This hasn't happened in Windows 98 though, and I can't see why. I have done some research on this, and although I couldn't find anything conclusive, I'm wondering if this ControlPanel\NameSpace function actually works in Windows 98. Presumably it does in Windows ME?! There are no other entries there. I'm wondering if this was overlooked, and the cpl file should not have been deleted in Windows 98. The other thing is that my scanner (an elderly Epson GT5500) works fine with the new system, but it won't recognise my new Nikon digital camera, either as itself, or as a generic device. Is there any way of adding it to the database and getting it to work, so at least I can use it properly in Windows 98 even if I can't in Windows 2000? The camera has no mass storage mode, only PTP, like all current Nikon cameras apparently. This is a problem for those using legacy operating systems like myself. The stock answer from Nikon is to just use a card reader, which I can and do of course, but it would be nice to get the camera talking to the computer properly! Any suggestions gratefully received. Thanks, Dave.

Thanks Den! Unfortunately when I tried to run the patch, I just got an error message that "the package is not compatible with the version of Windows you are running"! I could just extract the files from the package and install them manually, but if maximus-decim put that warning in, I guess it's probably a non-starter.

Thanks again jaclaz! I can't see any reference to MTP in the documentation of my camera, but I downloaded the package and installed it. Strangely, the installer wouldn't work straight away as it was. It kept saying that it couldn't determine the free space on my drives, which is something I've not seen before! Anyway I extracted the msi file from the package, and that did install OK. I couldn't see what it had actually done however, and it certainly didn't do anything obvious, or make anything work that didn't before. It is part of an SDK so I'm wondering if it's just developers' tools and doesn't contain any runtime files. Anyway, I've uninstalled it again for now. I had the PTP support files from XP installed again, with my modified inf file, and the camera was again appearing as an imaging device in Device Manager and the Scanners and Cameras applet in Control Panel, and appears functional. However, it still doesn't work in any software as an image source, so I suspect that the vital WIA service and files that are the interface stage between the imaging device and the software are not present or not functioning. I also started to get stop errors, relating to hal.dll, after the camera was disconnected. It would be fine while connected, but after disconnecting it, usually after about 30 seconds, the machine would blue screen. Not good obviously, and I don't want to get into substituting more XP files for the 2000 ones willy-nilly without knowing what I'm doing. When I've tried I've just ended up with a system that won't start! I'm wondering now if just trying to install the Windows 98 patch on Windows 2000 might be the next experiment to try. If I'm backed up I don't see that it will do any permanent harm, even if it doesn't actually work.

Well, I installed the WIA from Windows ME on Windows 98, and it seems to work as it should. Quite as impressive as NUSB, but that's a whole other (very long) story! It recognised my old Epson SCSI scanner, and gave me an alternative TWAIN interface to the Epson one (not as good I don't think) and another TWAIN source which is a Kodak 210 camera (which must be a pretty early digital camera, and seems to be serial connected rather than USB! I would imagine that the average cellphone camera is now better.....) Anyway, it didn't help with my Nikon camera. I tried installing it using the modified Nikon PTP inf file, and it appeared in Device Manager and in the Scanners and Cameras applet in Control Panel, but registered as "unavailable". Incidentally, and this is off-topic, installing the WIA patch deleted my Scanners and Cameras cpl file, and I had to put it back. Is it supposed to do that? Anyway, back to Windows 2000. Looking at the patch, I'm a bit loathe to just try installing it on Windows 2000, as I'm worried that it might have path information which would only be valid in Windows 98. Worth the risk? (After a back-up of course!)

Thanks Den! I've had a good look at that, and I'm thinking that I might install it on the Windows 98 side of my machine first just to see what it does, and then maybe try it on Windows 2000 as well.