Dave-H

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.

I see my system details have been updated in the list, thanks dencorso. The one thing that still gets me about all this is that MS have always maintained that there is no size limit on the registry in Windows 98 (as I believe there was in Windows 95.) From my experience, and others, in certain circumstances this is just not true, because of the 16MB memory limitation on start-up, which unbelievably still seems to apply on Windows 2000 as well! If you have the time, read through the later posts on my "Faster Startup For Windows 2000" thread, the other thing I've been trying to resolve, and still haven't! http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...18009&st=80 If you can write a patch to fix that for me Rudolph, I really will be impressed!

It certainly does! While we're here dencorso, could you update my entry on the list of users running Windows 98 with large amounts of RAM to say that I'm now running version 6.0 of Rudolph Loew's patch. Thanks, Dave.

Thanks Rudolph. I'll probably leave the SPLIT8MB file on the system and just REM out the line in autoexec.bat rather than remove it. Then I can easily re-enable it if any problems do appear. You do say that new programs can sometimes over-write your patched files and cause problems to come back, and that will be "belt and braces" should that ever happen! Cheers, Dave.

Thanks Rudolph. Glad you are across this thread! I have tried removing the line to load SPLIT8MB.EXE from my autoexec.bat, and the system still boots fine. Do you think I should leave it disabled or keep it loading anyway just to be on the safe side? I assume that there is no disadvantage in loading it. As I said, my registry system.dat file is now 14MB, and that's after removing a lot of registry space hogging programs (Real Player is one of the worst!) to get its size down. I had got it down to just over 12MB, which seemed safe, but with your patch it seems like I now don't have to worry any more! The problem originally came to light when I installed Office XP on the machine. That also writes huge amounts of registry data. Whether I could now get away with reinstalling it I don't know. With your patch probably yes, but I hate to think how big system.dat would then become! As I use it on Windows 2000 quite happily, I think I'll leave it like that. I don't really need to have it on Windows 98 as well. I'm just happy that at last I'm free of having to obsessively prune and compact my Windows 98 registry all the time to make sure it doesn't get too big again and stop the system booting! I'm very grateful for that.

Well, finally my problem is cured!! :thumbup The answer has finally come from Rudolph Loew, the creator of the Windows 98/SE/ME RAM Limitation Patch. I had been using version 5.1 of his patch for some time, to allow my system to function with 4GB of RAM installed. With it Windows 98 sees 3327MB, pretty near the same as Windows 2000, and the limit for a 32 bit OS. Rudolph has just released the next version, 6.0, which includes some interesting options for optimising the use of low physical memory. I quote from his manual - "Some Devices, especially many Gigabit Ethernet Controllers, require space in Low Physical RAM. Low Physical RAM is also used by Windows 98 or 98SE for Memory Tables. If there is not enough Free Low Physical Memory, Windows will crash during Bootup. Reboot, a Blank Screen, or a VFAT Error are the most common symptoms." Well, that describes my problem completely! It even explains why disabling my network card allowed the system to boot, something I never understood. Why it's taken so long to discover this is a mystery to me, as I did an enormous amount of research on possible causes of the problem. Anyway, using Rudolph's new patch, with the necessary switch which moves the VXD data above 16MB, and adding his additional low memory splitter program to autoexec.bat, the problem has completely gone away! I restored all the data to my registry which I had stripped out and backed up as being superfluous to get the size of the system.dat file down, and the system still booted, with a file of over 14MB! That would have been impossible before. So thanks indeed Rudolph! I hope you are subscribed to this thread and read this. Anyone else suffering similar problems, you now know where to find a fix - http://rloew1.no-ip.com It's not free, but IMO it's worth $20 of anybody's money, as it does exactly what it says on the tin, and more! After all this time I am well pleased.

Thanks again Ascii2. I think I'm at the point of giving up now. I managed to get rid of one of my ControlSets, one that was marked as "failed". It took me a while to work out how to change the permissions so the system would allow me to delete it. but eventually I did. This made very little difference to the SYSTEM file size. I then ran a registry compacter for NT registries which I found called NTREGOPT, which reduced it from 9MB to 6.2MB! At last I thought, but still no go, the system still wouldn't start with any of the newer start-up files. It looks as if three ControlSets is the minimum you can have, the Current, Default, and Last Good. Delete any of those and either the system won't start, or if it does it puts the deleted one straight back again. If even 6.2MB is too big for the system to start, I think I'm defeated. It started with the 2MB SYSTEM file in my Repair folder, but the system wouldn't complete loading, so that's no good. I can't imagine that I would ever get my working SYSTEM file down to anywhere near that size without removing so much that the system would be crippled. I'm now very worried for those earlier in the thread who said that their systems worked fine with the loader files from XP or 2003. I suspect that this only worked because they had very small SYSTEM registry hives. There is of course a high probability that this will not remain the case, and they will suddenly fail to boot without any warning. "Last Good Configuration" should work in that scenario, and I hope it does! I hope that if this happens to people that they read to the end of this thread and discover what the problem is, and that they've kept backups of their original 2000 loader files (or have a 2000 disk to restore them from!) So, I'm resigned to keeping the loaders as they are on my system. I have at least pruned the registry size considerably, which can't be a bad thing! My next line of attack (and I haven't ruled out trying jaclaz's proposed solution as well) is to try and just get my present boot a bit quicker. I've done all the obvious things like disabling all unnecessary services and startup programs, but the main problem is very early on in the process. I've done some research into the 2000 boot process, but haven't been able to find a definitive account of what order things happen in, and what's on the screen at that time. The "Starting Windows" bar goes across pretty quickly, so that's not a worry. The big pause comes at the next stage, the splash screen. The progress bar at the bottom moves across in jerks, but pretty quickly, until it gets about three quarters of the way across. It then pauses, for about 20-25 seconds, before moving on. That is what I really want to get rid of, as I'm absolutely sure that it hasn't always done that. I don't know what's happening at that point, but there's no disk activity during the pause. It's like it's waiting for something, or looking for or scanning for something. I suspect it's hardware device related. When it reaches the pause point, the keyboard lights flash momentarily, and then go out. They come back on when the bar moves on after the pause. Also at that moment there is sometimes a flash on the screen, and occasionally the display blacks out and then comes on again. This all sounds like hardware driver loading, but why the long pause? If I could get rid of that, and as I said I'm sure it hasn't always done it, I would be satisfied! Any ideas? I have no "problem" hardware on the system as far as I know. Cheers, Dave.

Thanks guys. Sorry jaclaz, I think I understand now! I obviously had completely the wrong end of the stick there. It would of course be very silly indeed to have to have a floppy in the floppy drive to boot up! I will follow up your suggestion if I don't get anywhere with my registry investigations. Ascii2, thanks so much for researching those KB articles for me! The one I was most interested in was 269075, which contains a section on reducing the size of the SYSTEM hive, which is exactly what I want to do. I went through it, but was puzzled to find that one of the registry keys that it refers to doesn't seem to exist on my system. It's "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Share". All I have under \CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer is a subkey called "Shares", not "Share". That is empty apart from a "Security" subkey, which is also empty. There is no "Share" key in any of the ControlSets under that path, so I couldn't proceed with that procedure to reduce the SYSTEM hive size. I did get hold of copies of the Windows 2003 NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM and OSLOADER.NTD files and gave them a try. Really bad move! It didn't boot, with the same error message, and when I went into Windows 98 to put the original files back, I got a frightening message that the MBR was corrupted! When I went into the Windows 98 Recycle Bin it warned me that was corrupted. Most worrying of all, when I went into "My Computer" on Windows 98 I found to my horror that all the drive letters (except C: of course fortunately) had been rearranged! I was really worried that I'd hosed the system completely, but fortunately once I'd restored the original 2000 startup files and deleted osloader.ntd, everything returned to normal after a reboot. So, where do I go from here..........

Well, I now have an important update! I've made something of a breakthrough since my last post earlier to-day, which deserves a new post I think. Not an actual fix I'm afraid, but I'm a lot nearer to understanding (I think) what's happening here. I was wondering, if you remember, whether the size of my registry files was an issue. My SYSTEM file, which is the file mentioned in the error message, is 9.26MB. Having had similar issues with registry size in Windows 98 (here if anyone's interested) I wondered if this could be a similar issue. I also read on the MS Knowledge Base that Windows 2000 only has 16MB of memory available while it's booting up. So, I did an experiment. I backed up my registry, and then substituted the SYSTEM file in D:\WIN-NT\System32\Config with the much smaller SYSTEM file in D:\WIN-NT\Repair. That file is only 2.77MB instead of 9.26MB. I then installed the XP NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM files which Ascii2 kindly provided. The system booted without the error message! The "Starting Windows" bar didn't appear at all, and the progress bar on the splash screen was much faster in completing. Then it went wrong. It got as far as displaying the GUI background, but before the "Preparing Network Connections" message came up, the system just rebooted. I tried again with the same result. I then put the original SYSTEM file back, and tried again. Same result! I then put all the registry files back from their backups. Same result! Strangely, the system file was always reverting to the smaller version. There is a SYSTEM.ALT file in the folder, and it's possible it was reverting to that. I got the system up and running again by replacing the registry backups again, and the original startup files. Then everything returned to normal. So, I'm pretty convinced that the problem is being caused by the SYSTEM file being too large. That almost certainly explains why simple later version startup file substitution works on some systems and not on others. It only works if the registry, or probably more specifically the SYSTEM file, is below a certain size. I assume that the loader is trying to fit the registry into memory on boot, and basically it's too big to fit into the limited memory then available. The 2000 loader possibly doesn't do this, which may be one of the reasons that it's slower. There must be more to it than that of course, or Windows XP installations would fail to boot if the registry got too big, but I'm sure that's the gist of the problem. The smaller SYSTEM file I have in the Repair folder is I believe the one that was backed up when Windows 2000 was last installed. It is from October 2007, which would make sense as I did have to do a repair install not very long ago, and that was probably it. Unfortunately it looks as if that file is not up to date enough now to start the system. So, what I need to do is get the size of my existing registry down! I've tried a compacter program on it, but that said that there was only 4% fragmentation, and made little difference. The SOFTWARE file is huge, 36.3MB, but I'm hoping that it's only the SYSTEM file that I have to worry about. So, what's stored in that file, and how can I go about reducing it? I assume that it contains the stuff in the "System" hive. I have three "ControlSets" as well as the "Current" one. Is that really necessary as they seem to be rather a lot of data. Can I somehow lose one or two of them without disaster? Any more help greatly appreciated. I feel I'm on the verge of finally cracking this now!

Thanks again Ascii2. Disc/disk, I've never been sure of the correct way to spell it depending on context. I always use "disc" to refer to round flat things generally, especially old things like vinyl record discs, but "disks" (US spelling?) when referring to computer disks/discs! A bit like "programme", the usual UK spelling, and "program", the US spelling, but always used when referring to computer programs. In fact my spellcheck (supposedly UK English) says that it's always "disk", and "disc" doesn't exist! Anyway, we digress............ Thanks for the files. I tried them, but the same result of course. I don't have access to a Windows 2000 SP4 CD, all I have is an update installation file for SP4, and while that contains later versions of NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM (which still don't work) it has no Recovery Console files included in it. I will do a search and see if I can download them from somewhere. Cheers, Dave.

Thanks guys, jaclaz your possible suggestion sounds interesting, but are you saying that I would have to have a floppy image on a floppy disk in the floppy drive when I boot to implement it? Ascii2 thanks for your input as always too. I will wait until I can lay my hands on a Windows XP disk again to try it out. There seems to be no uninstall routine for the Recovery Console. Do I take it that all I need to do is delete the C:\CmdCons folder and remove the CMLDR file? Is there anything else I need to remove before I try installing the XP version? Cheers, Dave.

Fixed! Thank you so much MDGx. I tried installing the HTML Help update and Scripting update that you pointed me to, and that made no difference. In fact I already had later versions installed, HTML Help 5.2.3790.309 Unofficial and Scripting 5.7.0.20550 Unofficial respectively. I then decided that rather than reinstall IE6 SP1, I would try just running the IE repair option from the tools under MS System Information. That fixed it. I then went back to my later versions of Scripting and HTML Help, and all still good. I guess I'll never know what the problem actually was. I had no reason to think that it was an Internet Explorer issue, as IE seems to work fine in all other respects. Very strange. Anyway, thanks again, and I hope the attachments issue is resolved soon. I will delete the spurious dummy post that I had to put up, and edit the post pointing to it to remove the reference. Cheers, Dave.