Has anyone else run up against this issue? I am running Windows 98SE SP2.1a on a dual boot machine with Windows 2000 SP4. I recently decided to install MS Office XP (2002) on the system. When I installed it on Windows 98, it appeared to install correctly, and worked fine, but when I restarted I got the dreaded BSOD "A device required for VFAT is missing or unavailable......system halted." I could boot into Safe Mode, but not into normal mode. I installed Office XP on Windows 2000, where needless to say it worked perfectly! To cut a very long and agonising story short, I discovered that I could boot Windows 98 into normal mode only if I disabled my ethernet adapter first. This is an Intel on-board device which had worked perfectly for 18 months. The same result could be achieved by not loading ndis.vxd on a step by step startup. The strange thing was that once the system had started normally, the adapter could then be re-enabled and worked perfectly! I had to remember to dis-enable it again before shutdown though......... I spent weeks trying to resolve this, unloading and reloading network drivers, researching on the web, to no avail. One thing I had noticed when I looked at backups was that my registry files had become much larger as a result of the Office XP install, and it was this that turned out to be the problem. If my system.dat file is bigger than about 12.5MB, I cannot boot into normal mode without the VFAT error, unless I disable the network adapter first! I had uninstalled Office XP (which was the first thing I tried of course) and this made no difference to the problem. It wasn't until I labouriously went through the registry manually deleting all the hundreds of entries that the Office XP uninstaller had left behind, that the size of the registry files went down enough to allow the system to boot normally. Talk about bloat, Ofice XP increased the size of the system.dat file by over 2MB! It was as if the registry files had become too big to fit in memory at start-up. I can only assume that disabling the ethernet adapter freed up enough extra memory for the system to start, and the adapter could then be re-enabled as it was then using a different bit of memory, ........or something like that! All my researches seemed to say that there is no practical limit to the size of the registry in Windows 98, as I believe there was in Windows 95, so I am very puzzled by this. I don't know if free conventional memory is an issue here. I have over 500K free, and 1GB of RAM, with all the necessary tweaks to allow for this, vcache size limit etc. I have a bare minimum of entries in config.sys and autoexec.bat. In fact bypassing these files and system.ini and win.ini on start-up made no difference to the problem. The only anomaly I've noticed is that my system reports only 1021MB of RAM present instead of 1023MB. In Safe Mode the full 1023MB is reported. I can find no reason for this despite researching the MS Knowledge Base and on the web generally. Has anyone any ideas on this, or has anyone had the same or similar problems? I obviously know what the problem is now, and how to avoid it (I certainly won't be putting Office XP back on Windows 98 for a start!) I'm just puzzled as to why it's happening.......... Happy New Year, Dave.
