Drugwash

I suspect this would be the case with Miranda and Win98SE + Revolutions Pack too, as I got a similar behaviour when I had that combination installed on my old HDD. What should one do in that case, Tihiy? I guess Miranda should be fixed to allow 32bit icons even on systems that wouldn't normally allow that, but there may be many other applications out there in the same situation. Oh... congratulations, you did a great job!

No. I mean I got the "message". I'm done here. Good luck.

OK, fine, I got it. Thanks.

I don't think the problem is in cmdTotal, because I just tested it standalone and it loaded the plug-in fine, it performed everything correctly, the destination folder was created but there was no file in that folder, so it actually didn't extract anything. (Snippet from KaKeeware site: Requirements Windows 9x/2000/XP or newer) Maybe there's some other unpacker that wouldn't play nice. Is there any possibility to create a very detailed and verbose log during the (attempted) unpacking, so one could find the reason for such errors? I'm willing to perform some tests here, time allowing.

I needed to perform some tests so I downloaded the Office XP update (KB920816) from here and tried to unpack it with UniExtract 1.5 beta. Unpacking went fine, apparently - got 4 files in the destination folder, no errors from UniExtract. Then, I tried to unpack the resulting RICHED20.MSP. This time I got an AutoIt error (see screenshot). I'm using Win98SE. The log follows: TrID/32 - File Identifier v2.02 - © 2003-06 By M.Pontello Definitions found: 2359 Analyzing... Collecting data from file: C:\Downloads\oxpp\RICHED20.msp 61.4% (.MST) Windows SDK Setup Transform Script (63019/2/6) 30.7% (.PPT) Microsoft PowerPoint document (31500/1/2) 7.8% (.) Generic OLE2 / Multistream Compound File (8000/1)

Tested 0.2.8 earlier today. On the bright side: • Skinning is faster now and doesn't take up so many resources (at start) • Painting glitch below the Start button is fixed Resources (System|User|GDI) in percent: 63 63 64 initially 34 34 61 immediately after TClock3 0.2.8 startup 7 7 54 after changing and applying some settings 9 9 64 after Explorer crash and restart All other issues reported previously are still present. There will come their time. After changing and applying some settings and closing the options panel, a click on the Start button crashed Explorer. Most tray icons haven't been restored. EXPLORER caused an invalid page fault in module <unknown> at 0000:00000001. Registers: EAX=00000000 CS=0187 EIP=00000001 EFLGS=00010202 EBX=0080f66c SS=018f ESP=0080f57c EBP=0080f618 ECX=019c0647 DS=018f ESI=0000c690 FS=2537 EDX=00003ade ES=018f EDI=0080f620 GS=0000 Bytes at CS:EIP: 01 00 00 00 04 70 00 c3 e2 00 f0 65 04 70 00 65 Stack dump: 019c0647 00000c44 00000002 00000000 00000000 0080f654 019c0666 0080f618 0000c690 0080f66c 1434c5b4 bff713e2 00000187 bff74272 0001cb04 0001cb04

I hope you're aware of the issues mentioned in post #36 and #39 of this thread, regarding riched20.dll newer than 5.30.x (sorry, direct link to specific post doesn't seem to work ).

I like to have a logo, it gives the machine some personality. Monsieur Fred, I see you're still in the mood for jokes. I'm not trying to prove anything and certainly do not want to drive this thread off-topic. Regarding permanent file deletion, I got used to it by using Total Commander which has the option to always delete files permanently. I like to have control of my system and not the other way around. Used to run Win95 on a 486 with max 528MB HDD, so hunting for free space was in the daily menu. I needed to know exactly how much free space I got after deleting unneeded files, but I always hated using keys with Windows. TotCmd allows me to do 99.8% of the operations only with mouse clicks, permanently deleting files included. So I guess old habits die hard. That's all. P.S. Please try not to mock my (nick)name, as it has absolutely nothing to do with what you're trying to imply. Thank you.

I suspect you're mixing EDO RAM with FPM, which is something that many boards do not accept, although they claim they do. Better find similar type memory sticks, according to the mobo specifications. 4.90.3000 is Millenium version, not 98SE. There's something fishy going on, but I think this has been discussed already (if I'm not wrong). No idea about the browseui.dll error - not related to Auto-Patcher, at least.

There is no "undelete" software installed on my machine whatsoever. That'd be just a different kind of safety net, which is unacceptable (for me).

People got used to doing things - sometimes very stupid things - just because they are aware of the "safety net" offered by the Recycle Bin function and they just don't care that much. "No problem, it's in the garbage; I can bring it back". Well, I think I became much more responsible since giving up the "safety net", as it forces me to think twice and also mind my clicks, before doing anything dangerous. Maybe that's why my Win98SE system has been in place for more than 2 years without any major revision, while most people I know reinstall their OS every 6 months if not more often. It's been only 2 years because old HDD crashed at that time. And that machine has been used mostly for testing alpha software - crashes, instant reboots, freezes requiring RESET have been the daily menu for all this time.

Here I go: • I reported the rebar arrows issue precisely because I tried with one of yours (the white one) and it didn't show up under any circumstances. • Subpixel antialiasing is (and always was) disabled here. • The ghost task button appears only for a split second and is probably noticeable only on slow machines. It can be seen better when there are one or two task buttons on taskbar and the start menu folders are hovered continuously up and down (I have 10 custom folders in the start menu, including a cascaded Control Panel). • For advanced task managing you could try CodeStuff Starter (freeware). FreeRAM XP Pro (freeware) can also monitor CPU, User and System resources in a simple way (can be seen in screenshot). • I'm not sure what you're referring to by "native skinning", but in case it's about Tihiy's Revolutions Pack, maybe you could talk to him directly, it'd be much easier to exchange impressions and ideas. Now to the news. Measurement of System | User | GDI resources (using FreeRAM XP Pro): - 90 90 94 at startup - 86 86 92 after ScreenGrab started - 84 84 92 after Metapad started - 53 53 79 after TClock3 started - 25 25 79 after Explorer crashed - 81 81 89 after killing TClock3 process After more testing, the following problems were found: • Task buttons are not properly resized when taskbar is moved from horizontal to vertical position and back (a few times). • Clock tooltip will not show year unless it's using capital Ys (could be so by design). • Left mouse clicks on clock are not detected; only right-click, opens the context menu. • Tray/Clock Fill -> Fill Style shows clock only when set to "Fill tray" or "Skin tray"; other modes hide/cover the clock. • After half an hour of enabling start menu skinning and tweaking settings: resources are 25 25 72. Just hovering the start menu and submenus a few times: 20 20 70. Cache is disabled. This may be a sign of GDI/resources leak. • A very weird bug with a 2px horizontal line at the bottom of the start button is being drawn (modified) by the CPU and LOAD progressbars in FreeRAM XP Pro 1.52 when its window is open on desktop (see screenshot). More weird is that the said line wouldn't act up if there's a tooltip showing for any of the icons in either taskbar or any custom toolbars. It also wouldn't show if there's ScreenGrab open (so I can't take a quick screenshot). It also appears occasionally when other windows are open or when typing in a text file; could be a video memory issue? • Custom toolbars on the side of the screen are not completely skinned: only icon backgrounds are skinned, the header is unchanged and the rest of the toolbar is transparent. Shouldn't be, in 98SE (I think), but I replaced gdi32.dll with the ME one and that added some previously nonexistant functions, including transparency (see screenshot). • Submenus in the start menu are not getting skinned until hovered. However, large submenus (the cascaded Control Panel with 32 items and a custom one under Programs > Uninstallers, with 35 items) do get skinned instantly when shown. • One separator in the start menu doesn't get skinned; probably there's no entry for it (between SymmTime and Programs, top-left in the second screenshot). • The Task Manager entry in the context menu does nothing. • When icon text is set to transparent and an icon is selected on desktop, the text background turns dark blue. Could this color be changed, at least to the default background color set in display properties if not to a custom one? • Hmmm... just when I thought everything was OK and tried to close TClock3, it crashed Explorer. Maybe start menu skinning is not a good idea, for now. That's about all I can think of, right now. Gotta go to sleep. Cheers!

Well, the above-mentioned tricks are known around and can be found on MDGx' site. There's quite a bunch of them, just pick the ones you need. Do you really want me to post them here? What were you reffering to, regarding the "hide symbols when..." ? I never use Active Desktop or View desktop as a web page and AFAIK removing My Computer icon from the normal desktop may lead to unpredictable results.

More feedback after some more testing (not intended as criticism - just reporting): • A "ghost" taskbar button flickers when hovering folders in the Start menu (Programs, Documents, custom ones, etc). • The start menu tries to get skinned, but all it happens is it gets black, with only icons visible - no text (black on black, possibly). That is not because of transparency, it wasn't enabled. Showing menus and submenus is painfully slow. • Rebar arrows are not being painted. • Clock tooltip doesn't show anymore (probably because of some skinning settings or because it's set to multiline). • The whole desktop refresh is much more slower now when TClock3 has enabled icon label transparency and text shadows. However, machine specs are low - 800MHz CPU, 240MB RAM, 16MB video onboard (SiS630 chipset). • Still unstable - explorer crashed again after changing a few settings. The options panel remained visible and functional, however no settings were being applied anymore. The TClock process remains in the memory and needs to be killed, as there's no other possibility to close it gracefully. After disabling Start Menu skinning, there was no more crash, and I made sure to play with settings a lot, so that must be the source of crashes. • All in all, it's quite a memory hog - I couldn't even open MSPaint at one point, so I had to exit TClock3. One cause may be the cache, which was enabled. Here's a screenshot of what I've been able to achieve so far:

Thank you very much for working on it. I just tested 0.2.7 and it does start now. The options panel briefly flickered on start but it did not stay open. It opened fine from the clock's context menu. One thing I noticed immediately was that the taskbar has lost its auto-hide property, staying always on top, over the other windows' titlebars. Another thing was that neither the tray icons nor the clock were visible; they were all covered by the skin (I use a WB skin), but the tray icons section was flickering when getting updated or hovered with the mouse. One other thing I noticed is that the Start button caption wouldn't change to what was set in the preferences. After I tried to change and apply a few combinations, explorer crashed (short report below). However, the whole taskbar was completely skinned, which never happened with older versions of TClock2 or TClock Light Unofficial (dunno if it was supposed to happen with those, though). That's great. So - all in all - things are going the right way; you're doing a great job! EXPLORER caused an invalid page fault in module TCLOCK3.DLL at 0187:014d1e83. Registers: EAX=015dfff0 CS=0187 EIP=014d1e83 EFLGS=00010206 EBX=015b3610 SS=018f ESP=0080f098 EBP=0080f0c4 ECX=00000000 DS=018f ESI=0002c9ec FS=252f EDX=0002c9ec ES=018f EDI=015b3610 GS=0000 Bytes at CS:EIP: 89 70 08 81 fe 00 10 00 00 7f 37 8b d6 85 d2 79 Stack dump: 015dfffc 015b3610 0002c9ec 014d2449 0080f0d4 014d2472 0080f0c4 015debfc 015b3610 0002b5ec 00000000 0080f0f0 014d1ced 014d1f33 014d23e5 0080f100

Great reports, 2Turtles, thank you very much! I'm sure you gave soporific food for thought. Soporific, regarding the :MISSING routine, you'll find it added at the very end of AutoPach.bat in my zip. I tried to do it in your style, I hope it got out right. All it does is report if any of the files in code or bin are missing. Regarding references to ErrChoic, they can be avoided simply by defining sections before the choice commands and looping back to that section on wrong key. Example (snippet from the debug mode choice I added in StartPch.bat): echo. Do you want to enable debug mode? [Y/N] :DebSel choice>nul /c:yn /n if errorlevel 2 goto DebN if errorlevel 1 goto DebY goto DebSel But I'm sure you knew that already - I got that from your code. Believe it or not, I had no idea so many things can be done in a batch file - I never got around playing with them. But I learn fast... sometimes (and it looks very similar to BASIC, which I used to know pretty well back in the Z80 days).

Welcome back! For a while I thought some croc made himself a new belt out of your skin. Quote: [...] you sound like a nagging mother when you do that! More like a father, I'd say... He-he... I like people with a good sense of humor, coz I got lots of it. BTW, that part with spinning backwards to save Lois is one of my favorites throughout the story. I like to think there are still people who would do that; this world needs some good things going on, for too many bad things have been happening lately. Back to our "business": I noticed quite a lot of fallbacks to :ErrChoic, which frankly could be avoided; it's pretty silly to abort the program just because the user pressed a wrong key in some menu. And still :MISSING was not present in 1.91; didn't get to download 1.92 yet, will do after posting. But if "nothing else is different", then the issue is still there. And I still need to build that testing machine, darn it... [EDIT] OK, I got in the mood for playing, so I modded StartPch.bat and AutoPach.bat a bit. Please have a look, maybe you'll like what I did. The zip also contains an old report and a new one, freshly created with 1.92. First off, I think the report is missing the version of the Auto-Patcher that created the report. It may be useful for comparison. I added that in the modded AutoPach.bat. New updates that appeared as uninstalled: - kb929969: Hotfix for Vulnerability in Vector Markup Language (was it added recently?) - Unicows: Layer for Unicode version 1.1.3790.0 (correct, was replaced by some stupid app with an older version) Updates previously reported as uninstalled, now apparently installed: - kb918144: Unofficial Hotfix for various issues in the Jet 4.0 data engine (not sure if I ever installed this manually, recently) - DirectX9: DirectX 9.0c (October 2006) (correct, I manually installed December2006 recently) - q314941: Hotfix for Vulnerability in Universal Plug 'n' Play (reported as not necessary as UPnP is not available on my machine) - q301540: Unofficial fix for bug in Installable File System Manager (reported as not necessary as there are no zero-byte INF files on my machine) - 7-ZIP: 7-Zip 4.42 (file archiver) (correct, as third-party apps were pulled from the auto-patcher)

I renamed the registry key, renamed the ini that I had previously saved - nothing would work. Access violation pops up again and as before, no setting gets applied. There must be more to it. Well, it's way past my bed time here, so I'll leave you think of other possible workarounds while I have a well-deserved sleep. Thank you for looking into the issue. Laterz!

No change, except for the DOS window that remains open. Should have two more commands: CLS and EXIT at the end of the file. Dunno what else to do, I don't have an IDE set up and either way, I'm not a coder, so options are limited. However, if there's anything else I could do... Yes, I have all kinds of versions installed. However none of them has any synchronization option enabled, nor any alarm set/enabled. And the first version I ever tried was TClock3 v0.2.5, so there were no previous settings to presumingly screw things up.

I just tested 0.2.6. First time I got the same error as above. On second run and subsequently, after enabling Dr.Watson, I got "External exception C000001D". Settings panel behaviour is the same: cannot be closed, needs to be killed. Interesting thing is Dr.Watson didn't move a finger. I tried Dependency Walker to see if I get some details and here's what it gave me.

Thanks for trying. I'm afraid you missed a very important step that might have been mentioned in the first post: you need to download the full v1.8 first (~233MB), download the 1.91 beta update, run the 1.80 installer that will unpack the files to a folder of your choice and then manually unpack the files in 1.91 on top of the freshly unpacked 1.80 (overwrite everything). The installer will create a desktop shortcut that shall be used for starting the actual program. First recommended step would be to choose reporting from the auto-patcher menu, to see what it detected. If you know for sure of any of the modules reported as not installed as being installed, please let us know. On a second run you may choose what to install or just choose "fully auto-patch". When all operations finished (many reboots will be involved), it's recommended that you run the report again and compare the report results with the options you chose to install. Please report any mismatch - that's the idea of testing it.

Tried 0.2.2 and 0.2.5 on a Win98SE machine. SetLayeredWindowAttributes is missing from USER32.DLL. I presume this may be one reason for it crashing on start. Error message is: TClock3 Properties Access violation at address 00000001. Read of address FFFFFFFF. After that, the settings panel shows up, options can be changed, but neither OK nor Cancel would make the panel go away. Process must be killed from Task Manager. No skinning is taking place however. TClock2 v1.2.0 and TClock Light (2004 as well as 2006 builds) run fine, but they both have their own pros and cons. So, any news on this project? Any chance of bringing it back to Win9x? If you need more info and/or testing, I'd be glad to help.

Whatever packages you'd test, I'm sure their authors would appreciate the feedback, in order to fix bugs and improve quality. So if you're willing to take your new HDD to a test drive, feel free to do so. Trying out every possible combination of packages, updates, patchers and whatnot should help you choose the final, best combination suitable for your environment. One more thing related to large partitions would be replacing the original Win98SE scandisk and defrag with their WinME counterparts. This would improve their operation and get over some issues with partition size. You can find both utilities bundled in one single package called scanfrag.exe, at MDGx' site or included with Auto-Patcher for Windows 98SE. Good luck!

You may try auto-patcher for Windows 98SE - it includes the 137GB fix as well as the Copy 2GB fix and many others. To the point, if SP2.1a has upgraded your esdi_506.pdr from 4.10.2222 to 4.10.2225 and you have no problems accesing data below 137GB, then it's safe to use the patched esdi_506.pdr 4.10.2225. However, for safety, backup any important data you may have on that HDD before proceeding with replacing files or installing any package.

Why would you want to do that? Because I don't use it, and it's ugly. Usually I have no icons on my desktop whatsoever, although sometimes I create some text file to paste temporary info. Heh, I thought that [disable Low Disk Space warning] was a new feature of WinXP. It may be, but I'm talking about Win98SE here. There's no way XP would ever make it on my machine. REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem] "DisableLowDiskSpaceBroadcast"=dword:03ffffff Oh and my browser is SlimBrowser, an IE front-end. Has been for about 5 years, IIRC, and will be as long as I use Windows. It's my choice, whatever others may say.