Dave-H

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.

Hi Soporific, I have just tried to use the new December 2007 full release of AP, but unfortunately I'm getting the same problem as I had with the previous version. I did manage to use the one before that successfully, but the last two versions won't run! When I run them the DOS box comes up and then immediately closes down. If I run the debug batch file, it runs OK until I press "any key to continue" and the same thing happens, it just closes! No error messages, nothing........... I have tried increasing my environment in config.sys manually from 768 to 4096, and even to 8192, but this makes absolutely no difference. It still won't run if I close down all other running programs. It will however run in Safe Mode, at least the DOS box stays open and will respond to commands, but I haven't tried actually using AP in Safe Mode. Is this OK to do? I would have thought that there would be things that it cannot do properly in Safe Mode, like system analysis. Any idea why it won't run in the first place? I did get the version before last to work OK, and I haven't changed any settings to my knowledge, so why would later ones now not work? Unless AP changed something itself of course which is preventing it from running again! Thanks, Dave.

Amen to that!

Thanks again, I had missed that link to UserAss. Got it now! The Registry Compactor program that I found is here http://www.majorgeeks.com/Registry_Compactor_d3504.html Seems to do the same job I suspect, especially now I've er, enabled it! I also found a program called "Registry Space Profiler" which I found very useful. You can find it here - http://www.tliquest.net/software/rsp/ It shows the sizes of the various sections of the registry, so you can see what's taking up the most space. In my case, the "Interface" section is the biggest, at 2,039,736, followed by the "CLSID" section at 1,926,404. All the other sections are very much smaller, but there's an awful lot of them of course!

dencorso, thank you so much! I have downloaded and deployed all the tools you mention, except UserAss 1.2, which I couldn't find anywhere to download. My searches only kept coming back to http://www.utdallas.edu/~jbs024000/software/index.html which doesn't seem to work any more. Do you know anywhere else I can download it from? I've removed all the UserAssist keys from my registry manually anyway, and I assume that's all it does. Registry Compactor only actually compacts the registry if you pay for it, but even without its full functionality it's worth having to tell you how much empty space there is in the registry. I assume that the Norton Optimisation Wizard, which I have been using for ages, does exactly the same job. My starting point was with system.dat at 12,273MB. I've now got it down to 11,677MB. The biggest drop was when I ran oleclean, when it dropped from 12,273 to 11,801. I couldn't believe how many invalid entries there were! Obviously I'd like to get it down to a bit smaller than that, but that will do for now! Thanks again!

soporific, I'm getting exactly the same problem as Bankis. The October full release installs OK but won't load, exactly as he describes. The DOS window, both in normal and verbose mode, just disappears, with no error messages. I've tried running the August full release again, which I had already run and used successfully a couple of months ago, but it won't run now either! Exactly the same result. It obviously isn't a problem with your program, something has changed, at least on my system (as the August release did work), which is now preventing the batch files from executing. I have tried the Environment Space fix which you suggested, and it did what it said on the tin, but makes no difference to the problem. I am intrigued by its adding of "REM -- please leave this REM line here" to autoexec.bat. What does that do exactly? Great program BTW, I was very impressed indeed with the August release when I did manage to run it!

Well, I'm still at it! Got the system.dat file down to 12.269MB now....... Checked with TonyArts EasyCleaner, which showed all green lights, no spurious entries. I would have been surprised if there had been, as I've always regularly checked the registry with Norton Windoctor, which does the same thing, and removed or corrected any invalid entries. Thought I would go into DOS and try a scanreg /fix routine, just to see if that made any difference. It got to 78% complete, and then told me - "Windows found an error in your system files and was unable to fix the problem. Try deleting some files to free up disk space on your Windows drive. If that doesn't work then you will need to install Windows in a new directory." What a load of rubbish! I certainly hope that nobody has actually reinstalled Windows in a new directory as a result of this nonsense. I assume that it failed because, as was mentioned earlier, scanreg chokes on any registry bigger than 8MB, which as far as I can see makes it completely useless, at least in my scenario! I will backup the files now and see if clearing the MRU and run data helps.........

Well, I have uninstalled .NET v2, which seemed to go OK, and removed an awful lot of registry keys. My system.dat file went from 12.689MB (which is right on the edge of allowing the system to boot!) to 12.333MB. Obviously worth having, but not as big a reduction as I had hoped considering that there had been over 1500 keys associated with .NET v2! This has now gone down to about 50 keys which still reference the .NET v2 folder. The registry compacter that I use routinely is part of the optimisation facility that came with Norton Utilities 2002. There do seem to be many others around, are any of them likely to be better than the Norton one? There was no change in the system.dat file size until I ran the optimisation wizard, so presumably the deleted keys just leave empty space until that is done. I do have the TonyArts EasyCleaner (v2.0.6.380) so I will have a go with that. I was disappointed that I only reduced the system.dat size by a few 100 KBs of size be removing .NET v2. I had been hoping for more. What I really want is to reduce it by a couple of MB, but I don't see how i can possibly do that without removing a lot of stuff that I actually still want to be able to use! eidenk said on Nov 11th that he got 6MB out of the registry by manual pruning. I can't imagine that I would ever be able to remove anywhere near that amount of data without crippling the whole system!

Thanks adamt. Sorry for the huge delay in responding, but I wasn't getting e-mail notification of replies as I should have been. Yes, the reference on page 319 of that book does look very familiar, even though it refers to Windows ME. Possibly this "bug", whatever it is, was perpetuated in Windows 2000. Unfortunately, the page which contains most of "solution 2" isn't available in that preview of the book! Anyway, I had already solved the problem by running Windows setup again, which has made the problem go away, at least for the moment.......... Thanks again, Dave.