Drugwash

This may not be the right place to report it, but I'm having some issues once in a while with that version of Explorer. As I keep my taskbar autohidden at the top of the screen, occasionally, when some window is maximized (happens mostly with SlimBrowser but not only), the taskbar does not show up, but a horizontal line about 1 px high can be seen, changing colored pixels as if each line of the taskbar would be painted over the previous, at the same position. This doesn't happen too often and can be overcome by minimizing/maximizing the window causing this effect, while quickly hovering the taskbar, to be visible while the window gets maximized. This trick may be hard to perform on a fast system, but my 800MHz Pentium III is slow enough to allow it.

My opinion: uSP should be kept as simple as possible. For 3rd party apps and other fancy stuff, there's Auto-Patcher doing a pretty good job. People can choose.

Off-topic: WildBill, you may create an account at ImageShack and upload any pictures you like. The size limit per picture is much higher (1024kB, IIRC) and there's no global limit on the number of pictures. They automatically offer thumbnail code for forums.

So, WildBill, is there a chance for you to test this under a Win98 system? There are a bunch of bugs and glitches, more or less crittical and they're pretty delicate to catch, reproduce and/or describe. Although you lately fixed some issues under Win2k, the 98 ones are still there, three of which are quite major, namely: - Explorer crash on exit - Systray icons missing - Resource leak/excessive usage Another disturbing issue is the fact that auto-hide doesn't work at all with TClock3, so any maximized window will be behind the taskbar. Given that I always keep the taskbar at the top, access to min/max/close titlebar buttons is denied. Recently, while testing 0.3.0-0.3.2, I noticed that simply hovering quicklaunch icons raises CPU usage to 100%. And one other bug I noticed is that the taskbar height can be resized to a value of zero. I simply disabled the sizebar and played dragging the taskbar to raise and lower its height; at one point I dropped it while it was completely invisible (zero height). It couldn't be restored, neither by reenabling the sizebar, nor by closing TClock3 - a reboot was necessary. I have to mention that I've installed the '256 color' patched explorer.exe (4.72.3612.1710) - dunno if that has any impact on TClock3's behavior. The above is just a quick review of the most important issues that are present on my system. Only intended as a feedback. Please keep up the good work and hopefully you'll be able to find and fix the 98 issues.

I'm sorry to say that none of the previous issues have been fixed in 0.3.1, apart - maybe - for the resources usage that is not that high now. But it still crashes on exit, systray icons still don't show no matter what kind of fill I choose, but most of all, TClock cannot run when Inspectr is enabled and running - it just freezes all processes including Explorer, and will not work until the system is rebooted. And if I'm not mistaken, the system menu is not being skinned anymore. But I disabled it anyway. All this is happening on the same Win98SE system (with some system files upgraded) - Pentium III @ 800MHz, 240 MB RAM, 16MB on-board SiS 630 video.

Yes, by 'installed' it means unpacked and ready. There is an installer that unpacks all the files and stuff, so technically there's nothing wrong with the wording. It doesn't say 'run', 'launched' or 'applied', but I admit, it can be a bit confusing. So just install/unpack the June SP2 full version and then install/unpack the July upgrade on top of it. Only then you may run/launch/apply the actual Auto-Patcher routine that'll do its job. Good luck! P.S. You do have the choice to install certain modules or not, so regardless of the version, you may opt out of installing whatever you consider unwanted/useless.

Here's how things go: it doesn't matter which older version you have installed, that you subsequently have upgraded to July 2007. As long as the July 2007 code does NOT include .NET installation routine, then .NET will not be installed, although it may physically be unpacked in the Auto-Pather folder as an installation kit, from the previous version. So fear not - the July 2007 code will not install .NET. Period.

Auto-Ptcher contains lots of updates and upgrades, many of them unofficial, and it's possible that something could screw up your system. I'm thinking of the 98toME module (or whatever it's called), but there could always be something else. In particular cases, on special hardware, even the most harmless update could trigger some weird bug. As we have no idea which modules you installed from Auto-Ptcher, we couldn't possibly adivise further. Thing is, you were advised to only install the DirectX version from that package, but it would have been better if you first tried to remove DirectX completel yfrom your system as I mentioned above, and then try to reinstall it. As for the ATI drivers, the best place is the ATI official site, unless your videocard producer has its own tweaked drivers on some OEM site. But you can try both generic and OEM drivers, if available, and not always the latest versions, but even older ones. Checking several forum posts by googling for your videocard model could help too.

You might wanna check some DirectX removal tool from the above-mentioned MDGx site and then reinstall DirectX 9.0c (latest 9x working version - should be bundled with Soporific's Auto-Patcher). Also try different versions for your videocard's driver.

Question: could you please elaborate on the 'is not officially supported' statement regarding .NET v2? I'm not a fan of it and I have no .NET version installed on my system yet, but tangentially, while collaboration on this IM application down in my sig, I might wanna install it at some point in time, if only to test some 3rd-party plug-ins that rely on .NET. So, could you explain what you mean by this supported/unsupported thing? There are heaps of applications that officially don't support Win9x, but work just fine on such systems, or with little issues that can safely be overlooked. While .NET v2.0 seems to work on such systems (your words) and there have been no heavy complaints regarding misbehavior, why would you remove it from the package? As I said, it's just a question...

OK, regarding the registry thing: Miranda IM only adds a key to the registry, and this behavior can be disabled by following the procedure described here.

There are so many free hosting services. RapidShare is the most stupid of all. I can NEVER download anything from there - I only get an .htm file instead, telling me my IP is already downloading that file, which is NOT true. My download manager (FlashGet) is disabled, links are only handled by the browser (SlimBrowser). :-( Sorry, but I can't test those fonts if I can't get them. Oh and over 40MB of a file... it does need a download manager, at least for some people.

Dunno about others, but regarding Miranda IM you could try installing the OpenSSL libraries from here. The Rich Edit may be needed by the message window; more information could be found by profiling miranda32.exe in Dependency Walker. You could search MDGx' site for a Win95-compatible version of riched20.dll and toss it to the %system% folder.

No problems for me. I installed in this order: 1. Flash 2. Roots Cert 3. KB838751 4. EXPLOR98 As a general rule, always backup the files that are going to be upgraded, before the upgrade, so in case of failure you can restore them (in DOS mode).

Which version of DirectX do you have installed? The required function (LockCB) in DDRAW.DLL seems to be available here by me; I have one of the latest Win98-available versions of DirectX 9.0c installed, although DDRAW.DLL is dated 09 July 2004. There could be something else though. Did you check the game's readme regarding supported OS/hardware?

I voted only 'Other' because I'm using Chun Sejin's 'Imagine'. Looks like the poll doesn't like that. Well, I'll have to choose something else too.

0.2.9 Systray icons do not appear, they're hidden under the background. System resources drop to a very low level (28%), especially if system menu is skinned. Crashes on exit, which forces an Explorer reload. 0.3.0 Not tested yet.

I got a better idea, if you don't mind... Here's the install log for Flash 9: link. Check the registry keys... Oh, forgot to mention: this is from a manual install, not from Auto-Patcher.

The kernel version and the IDE driver version do not necessarily have to match. The kernel may be (and most likely has been, through Auto-Patcher) patched/replaced by certain (un)official updates/upgrades, according to some versioning schema that follows MS' style, but that doesn't imply that any and all other files should be upgraded to the very same version number, if available. In this case, the 2226 version of the pdr driver is clearly only for IBM laptops, so desktop users should stay away from it always. Also, the official 2225 version of the pdr driver is coming from MS and is an upgraded/fixed version of 2222, meant to officially replace the latter. The patched 2225 version from LLXX is the very same official 2225, patched to support 48bit LBA. So it's safe to install LLXX' 2225 version over a 2222 pdr driver, on a desktop installation. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong...

I doubt there's any way of checking if one's using/installing this on a laptop or desktop. Unless there's a CPU check... So maybe there should be an additional validation for mobile/desktop installation, which would then make the difference between 2225 and 2226. And if that would be done, then this should be a global check, so any other mobile/laptop upgrade within AP would take this setting into account.

FlashGet is good (as is a very similar programme called GigaGet) but they do throw up errors of this kind because they break downloads up into chunks and these chunks don't always stick together properly, particularly with large files. When I was downloading DirectX the other day it ground to a halt saying that file size had changed. Since version 1.8x, FlashGet tends to throw errors, once in a while, not to mention other bugs/unwanted behaviour (that I reported some time ago in their forum but for some reason it dissapeared) on a Win9x system. But I still use 1.73 on my Win98SE, which seems to work just fine, and was still available from their site last time I checked. Soporific: I'll try to test the new version these days; currently I got work to do and a pretty tight deadline, so no promises. And I still have to build up that test machine, darn... (what do you think the run time would be, on a 166MHz Pentium I ? )

Redownload it. Prefferably using a download manager, like FlashGet or similar. Your archive is corrupt, for some reason.

Ah, so you want UNINSTALLERS for Macromedia/Adove stuff, but not the actual installers? Did I read that correctly? So what should one uninstall, actually? Do you remember that Auto-Patcher is meant to install/update what is not installed or old? So why shouldn't it be some Macromedia installers available, so one could have at least a newer version of Flash/Shockwave, even on a second/third/whatever run of Auto-Patcher? And those links to the latest versions could still be available, for those who do have internet access.

I'm also thinking of users that have no internet access. One may go over and install the OS and Auto-Patcher on top of it, and get the most out of it. But I guess Shockwave/Flash could be regarded as third-party apps. Anyway, I'd rather have Flash 9.x somewhere on the CD and have most apps/games run, than get stuck with older IE versions of them.

Dunno about Shockwave (never had it required by anything) but Flash is too widespread for it to be left astray. Just make sure it's the latest version and it's getting properly installed. YouTube already says "This sh!t requires Flash version 9 or later" so stick it in. As for ASPI, I think I heard about some 4.71.xxxx version, or am I completely out of track? Checking with Nero Info Tool, I get a report of ASPI 4.71 (0002) installed and working properly. It's just that AFAIR, the installer was pretty F'ed up and it needed some fix to be able to properly install that version. I have been disconnected with this project for some time and I am sincerely sorry for that. It may still take me some time to come back. However, things are going just fine, AFAICS, so keep it up!