Dave-H

No worries. I assumed the OP was talking about Windows 2000 as that's what is in his signature. It wouldn't be Windows XP unless he posted in the wrong forum, but it could indeed be 2003 as you say.

The OP is on Windows 2000 not XP. His default Windows folder will be C:\WINNT not C:\Windows. I'm not sure if the "noexecute=optin" switch is relevant on Windows 2000 either.

Thanks for that, I will check it out, but at the moment I'm more interested in getting the normal Windows HTML Help system to work than just finding another way to read .chm files. I'm worried that the fact that it's not working may be a symptom of a more fundamental problem somewhere!

Thanks. I have never had ntbootdd.sys, arcldr.exe or arcsetup.exe on my system. It has always seemed to work fine without them. The latter two are in the %systemroot%\ServicePackFiles\i386 folder. Ntbootdd.sys doesn't exist at all. My "SYSTEM" registry file is 9.25MB in size. Is that excessive? I do have the Recovery Console installed.

Thanks for that. I had a look at the utility you mention, and ran it, but it didn't seem to find anything wrong that's relevant to the problem. I was a bit apprehensive about a program whose documentation seems to be mainly only in Chinese, but it did seem to work OK, apart from the plugins bit, which I couldn't get to work at all. Any other ideas? Everything I've checked out relating to the HTML Help system files and registry entries seems to be perfectly OK, so I am really stumped. I also tried re-registering the dll and ocx files, but no joy.

Yes thanks, that what I eventually did. Thanks for that Ascii2, I will check it out. I'm interested what you say adout "registry hive fragmentation" as my registry is quite large and has never been optimised, so is probably very fragmented. I optimise my Windows 98 registry all the time as I have startup problems if it gets too large, but I have never bothered on Windows 2000. I'm wondering if this may be an issue here.

I have a problem with .chm help files being displayed in my Windows 98 installation. All the files display as HTML code instead of displaying properly. I've been trying to post a screen shot to illustrate the problem, but although I've done it many times before, I can't now find how to upload attachments to the board! If someone could remind me I'd be very grateful! Anyway, the basic problem is that the left hand pane displays correctly, with all the tabs present and correct, and it all works, but in the right hand pane all I'm seeing is HTML code, with no formatting or images. I have tried reinstalling the HTML help files, which all seem to be present and correct, but this makes no difference. Internet Explorer (IE6 SP1) appears to work fine, but if I try to open a .chm file in IE as a test, it just opens in HTML Help instead, with the same fault. I assume that is normal behaviour, but why won't the HTML Help browser display files properly? Anyone any idea what I should be looking for to fix this? Thanks.

I think you can use recovery console and do this: EDIT: Or another OS. That works too. Rename the \WIN-NT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM file to SYSTEM.BAD Copy the \WIN-NT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM.ALT file to SYSTEM This restores an older copy of the System hive and might fix it. That error occurs occasionally to my Windows 2000 and I would just have to change it to the ALT version and everything would be fine. Thanks for that, I could actually do that in Windows 98 as I am dual boot. Unfortunately the problem isn't that the registry is corrupted in any way (or any files missing!) What's happening (I think) is that on my machine for some reason if I have the NTLDR file from any other NT OS version except the original 2000 one in my C:\ folder, the system will not start because it's doing something that it shouldn't with the registry files. There isn't actually anything wrong with them, in fact if I put the original NTLDR file back without doing anything else everything comes good again. It is a mystery, because as I've discovered through this thread, it works on some machines and not others.

I know exactly what it will do, as I tried it so see if it would get Windows 2000 working again. It puts the Windows 2000 startup files back again! This fixed the problem, but of course Windows 2000 was back exactly as it was before, with a slow startup. What it would have done to Windows XP I don't know, as I didn't let the XP install complete. Quite possibly it would have made Windows XP start up just as slowly! So it looks horribly as if Windows XP will boot with the Windows 2000 files, but Windows 2000 won't boot with the XP files, at least not on my system. Of course if you trawl back in this thread, you'll see that using the XP files HAS worked for quite a few people. I just wish that I could figure out why it works on some machines but not others. I'm not 100% sure that anyone else with a dual boot machine has got it to work. I would be very interested to know if that was the case.

Ah, thanks for the warning! Well, it might be a bit of a "frankenbuild" but multibooting Windows XP with other MS OSs should certainly be supported, so I'm not asking for anything particularly non-standard!

Just a heads up about a possible problem with the version of the Adobe Shockwave player in the latest Auto-Patcher. I had been using version 10.2.xxx for some time, which certainly works fine with Windows 98 and I think is the last version to be officially 98 compatible. AP contains a version of 10.3.xxx which is supposed to work with Windows 98 OK. In my experience, although it installs OK and appears to work, it still has some issues. What was happening on my system was that it would run OK in Internet Explorer and would display the content OK, but on navigating away from the page, or shutting IE, the browser would immediately crash badly, usually resulting in me having to reboot. Try as I might I couldn't resolve this, so I've gone back to version 10.2. and all is fine again. This may not happen on every system of course, but I thought it worth mentioning just in case it happens to anyone else. If you have an installer file for shockwave 10.2 don't trash it just yet!

Another update. Tried out Ascii2's suggestion of going through the first stage of a Windows XP install. Unfortunately, no go. Everything went as it should, and I aborted the install at the first reboot stage. I now had Windows XP in the OS startup list from boot.ini, and XP setup was ready to do the GUI stages. Unfortunately, when I tried to run Windows 2000, immediately back came the "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt \WIN-NT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM" message. So, no difference I'm afraid. This is now even more puzzling, as it seems from this that if I really wanted to install Windows XP and have a triple boot system, I would no longer be able to run Windows 2000, which surely I should be able to do. Does this mean that in this scenario I would have to put the Windows 2000 startup files back and boot XP with them?! Surely not! I'm now thinking of asking MS about this, as although they don't give any free support for Windows 2000 now, they should still support XP, and I can submit the question as a Windows XP support query, because dual booting 2000 and XP should surely be possible. If installing XP makes 2000 inacessible that needs to be sorted out. So, back where I started I'm afraid...............

The quickest fix I can think of would be to just put the drive in another machine and reformat it, asssuming you have another machine to do it in of course!

Wow, I didn't think this thread would come back to life! Thanks for the additional information Ascii2. I tried downloading that MS patch, but the NTLDR file in it produced exactly the same result on my system, it wouldn't boot, with an error message about the registry "SYSTEM" file being missing or corrupted. Reading the KB article, it does sound like exactly the same symptoms though. I will try to borrow a Windows XP disk and try your suggested method of doing just the first part of the setup. BTW when you were describing that, were you were talking about running setup from within Windows 2000, or booting from the Windows XP CD? It won't run from a command prompt. I also assume that you would select to do a separate install, not an upgrade, or it will overwrite the Windows 2000 files! I'm not quite ready to give up on this yet..........

It contains (amongst other things) all the hypertext template (.htt) files for the web views of Windows Explorer, Control Panel, My Computer, Printers etc. etc. You might be able to remove it if you haven't got Webview on, I've never tried, but I wouldn't recommend it. Try just renaming the folder (to W~B for instance) and see what effect it has when you restart. If it's disastrous you can always boot into DOS and rename it back again. If it warns you that files are in use when you try to rename it in Windows, I would leave well alone!

I tried out eBoostr on my Windows 2000 system, and it installed and worked fine. Whether it produced any worthwhile performance improvements I couldn't say, as I didn't leave it installed long enough to find out! The problem was that I wanted it to use some of my under-utilised RAM (I have 4GB fitted) so I was setting up a 1GB cache in system RAM. All well and good, but unfortunately this resulted in eBoostr setting up a 1GB eBoostr.dat file on my D: drive, which is where Windows 2000 is installed (dual boot system.) This would have been fine, except that D: is only a 4GB partition, and this was filling the drive! I have e-mailed them to see if there's any way of getting the program to put that file on a different drive, or whether it has to go on the drive where the OS system files are. I haven't had any reply as yet. I was mainly interested in whether eBoostr would speed up my boot time, which is still too slow for my liking, but it sounds as if eBoostr doesn't actually improve that much anyway on Windows 2000.

I have just tried using the December 2008 update version of AP, and I'm afraid that I'm running into exactly the same problem that I had a year ago with the December 2007 full version. It just won't run! I tried running the update version and it told me that it was "missing a file" that was necessary for it to work. (Unfortunately it neglected to mention exactly what file it was missing!) I realised that it actually had to have the full version also installed. I had used the full version when it came out, but hadn't left it installed on the system to save disk space. I reinstalled the full version, and then installed the update version. All fine, but when I tried to run START_ME.bat, I got exactly the same result as when I first tried the full version a year ago. The DOS window just opens and immediately closes again, without any error messages. I solved this a year ago by editing down my autoexec.bat file, and once I'd got it to work I saved the revised file for future use. Unfortunately, if I try to run the upgrade version with the revised autoexec.bat that worked fine with the full version a year ago, it still doesn't work! Exactly the same result as with the normal autoexec.bat. It just runs and immediately closes again. The DOS "mem" command in a DOS prompt window with Windows running tells me that the "largest executable program size" is 572k, which doesn't seem unreasonable. Anyone any ideas? Thanks, Dave. <EDIT Jan 23rd> Well, I finally sorted it after a lot of messing around. It would only run if I completely disabled my autoexec.bat and config.sys files. I'm sure that didn't work last time!

This is an issue, but not an intrinsic irresolvable problem. I have a dual boot system using Windows 98SE and Windows 2000 SP4. I use drives up to 160GB without problems on both OSs (FAT32 of course). It is true that Windows 2000 will not format a FAT32 volume larger than 32GB, but Windows 98SE can. So I had to format the large volumes using Windows 98, but Windows 2000 has never had any problem reading and writing to them, even though it couldn't create them!

Nothing like this on my machine, for what it's worth!

The video on demand service at http://www.channel4.com/watch_online/ says that it needs Windows Media Player 11 rather than 10. Whether that means it uses DRM 3 I don't know, but worth checking out. Any response on the possible inclusion of Revolutions Pack in KDW?

Glad you got things working again! I'm sure you'd like to get your amount of RAM back up again though. I'm running Windows 98 with 4GB of RAM, although I haven't got Office installed! If you haven't already, trawl through these threads to see if there are any tweaks you can try to get the system to still work with your 2GB of RAM now you have got Office installed. http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...118097&st=0 http://www.msfn.org/board/Help-I-need-to-G....html&st=0 http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...memory&st=0 Do make sure that your registry is backed up before trying anything though! There should be a backup created automatically every time that Windows boots successfully. To make sure that's working type "scanreg /restore" from DOS, and make sure that you have the necessary backups. Your system.dat size is still small compared with mine.............

The files' contents indeed looks reasonable. Interesting that you have 2GB of RAM. I assume that configuration has worked for you in the past, with any necessary system.ini tweaks applied. At what point exactly did the system stop working?

That does seem to be a very small size of system.dat to cause the same problem I had. Mine is now about 12.5MB and still works OK. Also I never had Safe Mode fail to boot. If you're getting out of memory messages even trying to boot to Safe Mode, I would check that the config.sys and autoexec.bat files aren't full of unnecessary rubbish as the first thing. You can do that by booting to DOS ("command prompt only"). The first thing I'd try is disabling the two files altogether, as Windows 98 should boot without them, using default settings IIRC. Go into DOS and rename config.sys to config.s~s and autoexec.bat to autoexec.b~t. See if you can boot into Safe Mode then. Good luck!

Happy New Year win2000, and everybody! Just a thought leading from what I was experimenting with earlier. As Tihiy has stopped development of his Windows 2000 Revolutions Pack as far as I know, is it something you'd consider incorporating into KDW? Not particularly the new Explorer icons, which I can take or leave, but just support for 32bit icons in the OS generally would be a major enhancement, even if it doesn't actually make the icons work in things like Movie Maker 2! Just a suggestion. Dave.

He probably said to run "sysedit". Just type that in the run box. That will allow you to edit win.ini, system.ini, config.sys, and autoexec.bat.