Dave-H

I had another scan later on, and got another update, KB2813347-v2! It looks like an update for the first update, if you see what I mean.

Wow, thanks!

Thank you so much for that. I tried it, and actually got offered an update, KB969084! I never thought I'd ever see the yellow shield in the system tray ever again!

FWIW I use HWiNFO. The latest version of that still works on Windows 98, believe it or not!

Yes, that's very clear, thanks. Anyway, I'm happy that I really have got the last XP version of the runtime now! I certainly rebooted after installing 14.28.29213.0, but I can't swear that I had also rebooted after uninstalling 14.28.29812.0. Maybe it needed that to actually uninstall the files, but there was no prompt to that effect. You would think that even if that was the case the 14.28.29213.0 installer would have just overwritten them, or thrown an error if it couldn't, they didn't seem to be locked when I deleted them manually. Bit of a rubbish install and uninstall system really, everything looked absolutely fine in the Add/Remove programs list!

Yes, on advice from @UCyborg I deleted all the api-ms-win-core-xx.dll files, plus ucrtbase.dll, vcruntime140.dll and msvcp140.dll from the Firefox program folder. This resulted in the error message when 14.28.29812.0 was installed. I then uninstalled 14.28.29812.0 and installed 14.28.29213.0, which appeared to work fine, but made no difference! When I checked I found that the files in system32 were still version 14.28.29812.0, so the uninstall hadn't actually worked at all! I had to uninstall 14.28.29213.0 again, and then delete all the files manually, and then reinstall 14.28.29213.0 again, after which the files were finally the correct version and the Firefox error message changed to "Can't load XPCOM", which is a different issue. Maybe it does actually need the earlier version that was bundled with it, but at least now it's not an operating system error message.

I've noticed very recently that some videos are now not working, but others are still working fine. The ones that don't work just produce a black frame. I can't see why some are working but not others.

The error I got when trying to launch Firefox 52.9 ESR using the system runtime with 14.28.29812.0 installed was - "FIREFOX.EXE - Entry Point Not Found : The procedure entry point CloseThreadpoolWork could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll." So I guess that entry point is probably there on Vista but not XP. There may well be others of course. I wish I could remember exactly why I thought that 14.28.29812.0 worked on XP!

OK, after testing with @UCyborg I've finally confirmed that version 14.28.29812.0, although it apparently installs fine with no errors, does not in fact work on XP! 14.28.29213.0 is indeed the last XP compatible version.

I sent you a PM.

I thought the last XP version was 14.28.29812.0?

It works, thank you so much! The only thing which doesn't seem to work in Firefox 52.9 ESR is the snapshot feature, which does nothing. Personally I can live without that! It sometimes doesn't load when you first load a YouTube video, but the old version I was using used to do that as well. Refreshing the page makes it come good and it's then OK on subsequent videos. Off-topic here of course, but I hope this will help others. Cheers, Dave.

Brilliant, thanks! I'll let you know if it works.

How did you "lower" it to 52.0? I'd be very interested to see if the new version can be made to work in Firefox 52.9 ESR.

What "hub site" do you mean? Link?

YouTube is actually reasonably OK for me, the only thing which doesn't work is the video preview function when I put the cursor over a video in the list, which does work in Firefox 85, but not in Firefox 52.9 ESR. I use this UA string on YouTube - "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:51.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/51.0".

Thanks. I have tried different user agents on Facebook (I have an add-on which allows me to do that on a site by site basis) but they never seemed to make any difference. I don't want to use the mobile version of the site because it looks awful on my desktop. The new page layout has if anything made things even worse than they used to be, it's pretty slow and unresponsive even on Firefox 85! Why they use ridiculously bloated huge javascript routines on sites like Facebook is quite beyond me, I'm sure it's not necessary.

Yes, I use XP for online banking without a second thought. As long as the banking sites don't start failing with my browser (Firefox 52.9 ESR) I see no reason to stop doing that. I must confess that I've started to go over to Firefox 85 on Windows 10 for sites like Facebook, because they are crawlingly slow in Firefox 52.9.

I still use XP as my default OS, and hope to continue to do so for a very long time yet. I have to have Windows 10 as well now because I have programs I need, like Adobe editing and web publishing programs, which now will only run on 64 bit Windows 10. For general use I still much prefer the UI of XP though.

You were probably lucky to find even one driver that worked on XP! What's the problem with the driver you're using?

I've never found any reason not to use the latest released version. I do worry that one day I will not be allowed to update any further as my old hardware is deemed to be incompatible, but it's not happened yet!

Well I did the registry file with the default paths that the installer should have used, had it worked, so if your path to the JRE files wasn't exactly the same you would have needed to change it of course. In fact you could almost certainly now move the JRE files back into a subfolder of the ASuite folder as it was before if you wanted to, and as long as you change the paths in the registry to match, it should still work. As regards the Java installer failure, an alternative to trying Safe Mode would be to use msconfig and disable everything that's not necessary and try in a "clean boot" mode. Whether this would have worked I don't know, but the installer would be more likely to still run in clean boot mode than it would be in Safe Mode.

The reg file was just the equivalent key copied from the Java 8 installation on my XP system, with the paths and version numbers suitably altered for the Java 7 version you downloaded. So, a bit of both really. It was a "modified copy"!

That's a very good question. I never had any problems installing Java on XP with the normal installer until later versions of Java 8, where the Java still worked, but the installer became incompatible with XP and wouldn't run at all. It's not unusual to find multiple versions of Java on a system. Because some applications need specific versions, like with your problem where it needed specifically Java 7, installing a Java 8 version, for instance, does not uninstall any earlier versions which are already present. Different versions can coexist on the system quite happily. The only thing I can think of is that something on the system in question was blocking the Java installer from completing everything that it had to do. Could be security software of course. Did you ever try installing in Safe Mode, I can't remember? Some installers won't work anyway in Safe Mode of course, but it's always worth a try. It sounds like you're fine now anyway, and if you don't have anything else on the system that needs Java I can't see any reason to worry that it's not fully installed at system level. Cheers, Dave.

So it worked? That's great news! 👍😁👍