Installation of MS Office Messed up Windows 98

[owlsnesttoo]

I always had problems with Windows 98SE concerning Explorer and the Recycle Bin. Delete a bunch of files or open and close 5 or 6 folders and everything would come to a screeching halt (really slow), necessitating a restart.

I recently had a major crash of the OS and installed Windows 98 instead, doing all the security upgrades and upgrading from IE4 to IE6 at once. All of my prior file storage issues went away.

Yesterday, I reinstalled MS Office 2000 Professional and now I'm back to where I was with Windows 98SE. The install initiated a totally unnecessary Windows Update and I belatedly discovered that the CD contained IE5 files, which presumably were part of the problem with my Windows 98SE system.

Is there any known fix for this problem? If not, and I do a reinstall of Windows 98 over the existing OS, will this get rid of the files that were messed with by MS Office and put things back to using IE4? If it did, then I could go through all the security updates and the upgrade directly to IE6. With this procedure, would my program registrations stay intact so that I didn't have to reinstall Office and start the problems all over again?

This is really aggravating and I was so happy with my "new" OS.

Please help, Sharon

[RetroOS]

I always had problems with Windows 98SE concerning Explorer and the Recycle Bin. Delete a bunch of files or open and close 5 or 6 folders and everything would come to a screeching halt (really slow), necessitating a restart.

...

This problem was known for years by Microsoft and never fixed!

However, the nice supporters here on MSFN fixed the problem!

Download and install this Windows Shell fix for 98/98SE from here: http://www.mdgx.com/files/SHELL98.EXE

If you wanted to run 98SE again (recommended) instead of 98, then you should do an in-place upgrade before installing the Shell update.

I used to have the lockup problems with Windows Explorer up to a year ago. I was tearing my hair out!

Then I discovered MSFN and the rest is history!

[owlsnesttoo]

Thanks so much! I had downloaded and attempted to use all of the fixes for Windows 98 from the mdgx website, but I did the Windows fixes before I did the upgrade to IE6. This meant of course the shell98.exe didn't work, because it requires IE5.5 or higher. No reason was given for the failure and I guess I deleted it. I've gotten it again and hope that it will work! I had no idea that other people experienced this same thing for all of this time and feel like an id*** for not investigating the problem sooner.

Oh, I would upgrade back to Windows 98SE, but even though I got the cab files with my OEM computer, I didn't get setup.exe or a CD key. My cousin gave up his Windows 98 computer and gave me his CD and key for that. Since the computer is so old I don't really want to go spending money as the difference between that two isn't much. I've upgraded the USB support and the DUN and so far no problems.

Thank you for answering so quickly.

[owlsnesttoo]

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

This time the fix worked and I've actually opened a bunch of folders and deleted quite a bit of stuff, and I'm still running what should be normally. Amazing that Microsoft never thought this was an important enough issue to fix as it's driven me out of my mind for years. Now I can remove the 75 shortcuts from my desktop!