Constant Non-Heap Crashing 98SE

[EyesOfARaven]

(apologies for the length, but I wanted to be thorough)

I'm experiencing regular crashes of explorer and IE6SP1, sometimes other apps, but most notably IE. I have installed the following in the listed order:

98SE

98SE SP3 beta

98SE2ME (without shell replacement)

RP9

KernelEx 4.0RC2

(I am aware there is supposedly some incompatibility with RP9 and KernelEx, but I haven't experienced ill effects from that afaik. My first install of the two didn't work right, but after reinstalling KernelEx all was well..)

I also applied a custom patch of a few hex edited files to make the version number in VER and any other references 4.95.2009, but this has not contributed to the problem afaik as it began prior to that.

I have the resource meter running so I can keep an eye on the heaps, and they are usually around 80-90% free when the issues occur, which makes little sense to me, as I had been assuming they were to blame. RP9 did help the problems happen less often, so perhaps SOME of the crashes were due to that.

What information can I provide you guys to help me troubleshoot? VXD list? Heapwalker?

As well, I was having an oddball issue with EMS memory. I switched from himem.sys to himemx.exe, no change in this issue, which is that it can't find enough UMB to set up the page frame for EMS. I set NOEMS, and it tells me I have an invalid parameter, but it works, bah. (even with the error it lets me hit enter or whatev. to continue)

The system is running great, with the exception of some newer games (newer in a 98SE sense.. Morrowind for example) refusing to work properly. Is my chimera of a system making itself incompatible with these apps?

Youtube videos lag, especially fullscreen, whether flash9, flash10, Opera, IE6, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, anything. The same videos don't lag if I download them and play the FLV in VLC fullscreen.

System specs:

Hot-rodded Dell Dimension L550r (now boots and says L999r due to CPU)

Pentium III @ 1ghz

SB PCI64 (or one of the compatible variants, can't recall)

Nvidia GeForce 4 440 MX 64MB

512MB RAM (half pc100, half pc133, for some reason it didn't like my other pc133 stick)

750GB HDD formatted in fat32 as one huge partition (did this in XP with third party utilities with the disk attached to a newer PC over USB)*

*Note: The 750GB IDE disk is on a PCI Promise 133TX2 controller with proper cabling to run at Ultra 5, and the drivers for the controller are installed (as are those for everything else, even the chipset).

This same box worked flawlessly in every imaginable way under DOS 7.10 with either no Windows, Win31, Win311FW, or Win95OSR2. I then decided on Win98 for it's compatibility in both directions, and after getting settled in and tweaking everything began to observe this problem.

Thanks.

Edited July 23, 2009 by dencorso
Changed the subtitle to reflect that the problem was solved.

[eidenk]

We are going to attempt to solve your browsers stability issues.

For a start, can you provide a list of all the modules in use by explorer.exe and iexplore.exe (internet explorer) ?

[dencorso]

For a start, can you provide a list of all the modules in use by explorer.exe and iexplore.exe (internet explorer) ?

Easiest way to do it is with NirSoft's CurrProcess.

BTW, try a radical test: comment out EMM386.EXE from your config.sys and see if that gets the system more stable.

Yea, I know, there'll be no UMB's then, but, then again, this is just a test.

[EyesOfARaven]

Here's a pastebin of what curprocess had to say module-wise about explorer.exe:

http://pastebin.org/2624

And iexplore.exe:

http://pastebin.org/2625

I ran dependancy walker on Internet Explorer and it showed up with three missing DLL files:

APPHELP.DLL

INETCOM.DLL

USERENV.DLL

APPHELP and USERENV are under SHLWAPI.DLL, and USERENV is depended on directly by IEXPLORE.EXE..

[eidenk]

Allright, we'll come back on that later. There are quite a few differences in what runs on my system which is rock stable and yours and if your system was now mine I'd check out a few things from closer perhaps.

Do you have an idea when your troubles started ?

Have you been running registry cleaners and if so which ones ?

Have you applied explorer or browser related registry tweaks ?

[eidenk]

Btw if you could run DrWatson and upload a crash log for both Internet Explorer and Explorer it would be nice because we would know what modules are loded when the crashes occur. You may have more modules loaded at that moment than what you've snapped with current process.

[EyesOfARaven]

Not sure exactly when it started.

I have been religiously running CCleaner as I do on all of my Windows boxes of all versions, which includes a registry cleaner. It doesn't massacre the registry afaik, but I haven't had a ton of personal experience with it on 98 yet. I have glanced through what it deletes and it's mostly unused file extensions, missing DLL file references, etc..

I've never used DrWatson but I assume it's straightforward. When I'm done copying these piles of files I'll browse around with it up on IE until it crashes again.

Without emm386 there is little difference in my system. I am just copying files around and listening to music, which wouldnt cause instability WITH it, so I can't tell as far as that goes, but I only save like 20-30KB using UMB, so it's not too big a deal to keep it like this for now.

Unrelated: Why do JemmEx and Jemm386 not work with... anything? They work great, take up like no RAM, but then when you go to run a DOS game in DOS with them, or launch Windows, they always exception out.. That's the only reason I don't use them..

[EyesOfARaven]

Removing emm386 has certainly increased stability to a degree. I did a good multi-hour optimization session on my boot files, and switched over to umbpci.sys + himemx.exe in the end, adding a few new TSRs etc.. Went from 540K conventional free to 608K conventional free.

Radical changes included renaming smartdrv and dblbuff so they wouldn't load, as I don't care to have my 750GB disk on a PCI controller buffered, and the rest of the system is fast enough for me without buffering as well. The conventional memory was worth it.

I tried to do the hiram.exe trick, but it kept hanging on boot. I tried every combination involving hiram, himemx, himem, and umbpci, and no matter what I did it hung right before, or right after installing hiram.

Anywho back to the topic at hand, I got a drwatson log right after the crashing began. Unfortunately I then closed drwatson, and couldn't get it back up as the crashing continued and brought the whole system to a state that needed a reboot.

Here's the log file:

http://rapidshare.com/files/256901245/wats...6crash.wlg.html

[eidenk]

Cool but I'd like a crash log for explorer as well if you can as you say it crashes a lot.

Btw this does not seems like a crash log to me but only a snapshot. A crash log is a snapshot that is automatically generated and saved to disk by DrWatson when an application crashes. You need to run DrWatson as a backround task for this to be possible to happen.

After that I'll suggest several optimizations, checks and fixes (I have a few precise ideas already) and hopefully we'll be able to fix your system.

[EyesOfARaven]

I'm afraid that's the best I can do then, as when the system becomes any more unstable it's unlikely that it will function enough to even react to the crash itself. I took the snapshot after IE6 was non-responsive, so it wouldn't be much different were it to have been taken a bit later, as far as modules and such go.

As for explorer, I have far less problems with that than IE, it's crashes are relegated to when I am copying lots of files with three dialogs open to various locations, and I'm practically inviting them to crash. Hopefully those will be reduced with my new tweaks, but if not, perhaps there is a way to get explorer windows open in a new process, such as in XP, on demand? This way if I know I'm going to be copying files around, I can open a new explorer process for each major operation, keeping them from crashing each other or the main shell instance.

Thoughts?

BTW: IE has been crashing less since I removed EMM386, though I couldn't imagine why. It took me 30-40 minutes of browsing with 4-5 windows open to get it to crash last time, and that's much more managable, though still not optimal. That's much closer to the experience with IE6 I remember when I was younger, so perhaps there's no fix for it? The crashes still occur with plenty of free heap though.

Again, thanks for helping me figure this out guys.

[eidenk]

Thoughts?

None of course

[sp193]

Flash does play slowly(And lags my system a lot!) on my 1.0Ghz Pentium III with 512MB RAM

If IE crashes then your explorer shell would also crash (it is, after all the same program).

Scan for spyware (They DO make windows so much more unstable!) and viruses.

BTW It's really normal for IE to crash a lot on Win98.... (Mine locks up, but doesn't crash my shell as I isolated it)

EMS memory.

Win32 programs usually don't use such a system anymore. Windows would allocate memory (And the program would request it, without knowing how it was mapped).

Unless you plan to run DOS programs.

Edited July 18, 2009 by sp193

[EyesOfARaven]

I do/do plan to run DOS apps, but even on my DOS machines I don't use EMM386, I run QEMM97 on those. AFAIK my games/progs don't use EMS though, just XMS, as I typically use NOEMS on QEMM or EMM386.

Again, does anybody have any idea why Jemm isn't compatible with anything? Is it just me?

[dencorso]

Again, does anybody have any idea why Jemm isn't compatible with anything? Is it just me?

No, you're not alone. It simply still has too many bugs. And, BTW, himemx.exe is not bug-free either, but is already reached a very acceptable stability. Now, if you don't have any DOS EMS clients in use, I do strongly advise you to remove EMM386.EXE from your config.sys and not add any alternative in its place. Win 9x/ME can provide by itself EMS in a DOS box when requested. And Win 9x/ME is much more stable without EMM386.EXE or its competitors.

[EyesOfARaven]

Yeah that's what I decided to do as well, and I'm glad to hear that 9x can throw EMS to apps in it's DOS boxes, as that should cover any EMS needs I would have anyway, and if I am in DOS I could just launch an EMM dynamically.