98 FE + 98 SE + ME updates + patches + (hot)fixes

[CLASYS]

You mean the corrected Win98 INF file for KB918547. already did late Wednesday. should apply to ALL editions of Win98 (both FE & SE).

Apparently the KB918547 updates DO care what version of IE is installed. I've tested the KB918547 updates under Win98/ME. They will NOT work unless IE 5.5 SP2 or higher is installed. Looked at the contents of the KB918547 Win98/ME updates in Wordpad and they check the version of SHDOCVW.DLL file installed. It has to be version 5.50.4807.2300 or better. Otherwise the KB918547 patches refuse to install the files.

Can we now agree that the SP should optionally include updates to IE? Apparently limiting the choices to either IE55SP2 or IE60 [or IE60 SP1]?

It would appear the hand is now forced, else new updates have to be withheld!

cjl

[Petr]

You mean the corrected Win98 INF file for KB918547. already did late Wednesday. should apply to ALL editions of Win98 (both FE & SE).

Apparently the KB918547 updates DO care what version of IE is installed. I've tested the KB918547 updates under Win98/ME. They will NOT work unless IE 5.5 SP2 or higher is installed. Looked at the contents of the KB918547 Win98/ME updates in Wordpad and they check the version of SHDOCVW.DLL file installed. It has to be version 5.50.4807.2300 or better. Otherwise the KB918547 patches refuse to install the files.

Can we now agree that the SP should optionally include updates to IE? Apparently limiting the choices to either IE55SP2 or IE60 [or IE60 SP1]?

It would appear the hand is now forced, else new updates have to be withheld!

cjl

BTW, there seems to be more IE 5.0 browsers than IE 5.5 browsers:

http://history.toplist.cz/stat/?a=graph&type=1

At least in the Czech Republic. Do you know any similar graph for the whole world (or USA)?

Petr

[eidenk]

What's the benefit of IE6.1 over 5.5 ?

[CLASYS]

What's the benefit of IE6.1 over 5.5 ?

Besides the downsides, hopefully mostly band-aided by using the browseui and browselc substitutions to overcome:

Many on-line anti-malware scans require Active-X, a virtual lock for IE. An alarming change is that they are now also requiring IE 6.0, not earlier [ Haven't yet found one that required IE 6.0 SP1, yet!] I assume you understand the worth of such as Trend Micro Housecall, Panda Security Scan, Bit-Defender, a-squared anti-malware scanner, Webroot Spy Audit, or even McAfee and Symantec's parallel offerings.

IE <less-than-6> is now officially a dead-end. New security updates already have appeared post 5.x; more will follow; some are specific to 98/SE/ME, or some of us will make them so.

To my knowledge, AOL is a thinly-disguised IE 6.0 SP1. Clearly many other apps are; they don't work with earlier versions, or at least not necessarily completely.

I prefer FireFox; these companies and others prefer IE, and most if not all either currently do or soon will require IE 6 or newer.

cjl

[MDGx]

These are the answers from the author of the GDI*.* patch:

I believe the GDI*.* fix [unofficial Q912919] for both 98SE + ME takes care of the newly discovered WMF bug [MS06-026 a.k.a. Q918547], but I'm not sure.

I'll wait for the GDI patch author to tell me if that's true, and will let you guys know.

No, the newly discovered WMF bug is not taken care of by the GDI patch(es) I wrote. It is a totally different WMF record that, when malformed, could allow remote code execution. I am afraid KB918547.EXE & Q918547.DLL will have to be installed to be protected. Apparently it is a privately disclosed vulnerability, so there is no proof-of-concept file available to use for patch development and testing.

Bad news, the GRE WMF fix is made of 2 TSRs, similar to Q891711, actual GDI32.DLL/GDI.EXE *not* patched.

It is worse than that, I am afraid. KB918547.EXE has at least one bug. It is identical to one of the bugs I fixed in KB891711.EXE. I have a patch already, but it will take a while until I can release it. I am way too busy at the moment to test it under Win98SE. It is not a bug that can cause the kind of system stability issues as we have seen with KB891711.EXE, so I think it is much less urgent.

When patching KB918547.EXE I also noticed code that really puzzled me. I do not yet know what to make of it.

[erpdude8]

UPDATED · 6-22-2006

Please see the top of this topic for most recent updates.

CRYPTME has 128SC.DLL file! Remove it and any references to 128SC.DLL as it is NOT needed and outdated for WinME. Revise the CRYPTME.EXE patch. WinME has built-in 128bit SSL encryption for IE.

Edited June 23, 2006 by erpdude8

[MDGx]

CRYPTME has 128SC.DLL file! Remove it and any references to 128SC.DLL as it is NOT needed and outdated for WinME. Revise the CRYPTME.EXE patch. WinME has built-in 128bit SSL encryption for IE.

You're right.

SCHANNEL.DLL is ver 5.131.2133.2 on WinME.

I took schannel.dll from WinME CD, renamed it to 128sc.dll and added it to cryptme.exe for completeness.

* Unofficial Windows ME CRYPT32.DLL 5.131.2133.6, CRYPTDLG.DLL 5.00.1558.6072, CRYPTUI.DLL 5.131.2133.2, ENHSIG.DLL 5.00.1877.8, MSASN1.DLL 5.00.2195.6905, MSCAT32.DLL 5.131.2133.2, MSSIP32.DLL 5.131.2133.2, RSAENH.DLL 5.00.2133.2, SCHANNEL.DLL 5.131.2133.2, SOFTPUB.DLL 5.131.2133.2, WINTRUST.DLL 5.131.2133.2 + XENROLL.DLL 5.131.3659.0 128-bit SSL Encryption Security Vulnerability Fixes:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/...n/ms04-011.mspx

Direct download [721 KB, English]:

http://www.mdgx.com/files/CRYPTME.EXE

I discovered another "glitch" in cryptme.exe:

forgot to add nircmd.exe + start.exe to the SED file, therefore to cryptme.exe. ;-(

Corrected. ;-)

Please try cryptme.exe again to see if it works ok.

Thanks.

[Guest bigbadsteve]

Son of a non-gender-specific-beetch, I accidentally surfed to the middle page of this topic instead of the end b4 writing the following, well maybe something's still relevant to some1 [wot a n00B ]

even the built-in "MS BACKUP" tool has this flaw; I've tested it, just like all the copy/zip/backup progs... it made me pull my hair out by the roots, for a very frustrating 2-wk period last year, when I was desperately trying to find a truly reliable backup method/tool...

Indeed, some of mine turned grey in the same situation, after discovering the 'big name' backup program I'd been using for years was chock full o' bugs. Of the others I tested, even Nero BackItUp, the one bundled with Nero Express and used by millions of people round the world, with all patches applied, truncated a lot of long file names with no warning.

Pity the poor foo' who faithfully runs their backup program regularly but never fully tests the restore, then after a bad system crash finds the manufacturer didn't either.

I have used XXCOPY a number of times for disk copies with great success, though I'll use the /tcc switch in addition to /clone the next time.

In answer to somebody's observation (sorry, a li'l rushed, trying to get to bed b4 sunup), XXCOPY displays nag screens only on 1st run and then again a few months later, whence if u download a free new one it shuts up for another few months. Though I hate nag screens I consider this a minor irrititation considering the functionality and configurability of the program.

Will be cutting over to XP myself over 6 months (will take a while with my many apps and learning enough XP tweaks to tame it) but I'm keeping 98 going on multiboot coz no doubt XP will be too newfangled for some of my older hardware & apps.

Edited June 25, 2006 by bigbadsteve

[Guest bigbadsteve]

15 days til Micro$oft end Win98 support, tik tok tik tok... I'm hoping the h4X0rz will focus on XP for their new h4x since us Win98 users are a select minority these days.

Can anyone suggest a good website for new security headsup for after the 11th? Some of u brilliant geeks will no doubt actually write patch code as u have been doing, hopefully there'll be some simple workarounds for some other stuff... and I notice some exploits like certain wmf ones are caught by my virus checker. Helps if we know about new holes ASAP but.

I see there's http://www.cve.mitre.org/cve/index.html where they list vulnerabilities from all sources, but due to their 'editorial' control of listings, warnings could take a while to filter through to their webpages. Is there a better site? I guess ideally with an RSS feed or similar selectable by operating system.

Edited June 25, 2006 by bigbadsteve

[MDGx]

6-27-2006

Added unofficial U918547 fix for Windows 98 (FE)/98 SE/ME.

U918547 has its own forum:

http://www.msfn.org/board/?showtopic=77218

Please post all/any related comments/bugs/tips/etc in U918547 forum.

Edited June 28, 2006 by MDGx

[erpdude8]

I'm planning on making a new release in the next few weeks.

About the 98FE SP: I don't think I'll have time to maintain that. Last I heard, Gape would be maintaining that SP.

the_guy

ok. so far Gape has done nothing with the 98fe SP.

alright. I've posted up beta 1 of the 98fe SP2 today. I've decided to make only beta releases of the 98fe SP; that way the 98fe SP project wont seem dead. I will NOT make any final & release candidate editions of 98fe SP since I dont have enough time to for those and I want to enjoy my summer vacation.

see latest page of the Service Pack for Windows 98 Standard topic:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...4732&st=135

Edited June 28, 2006 by erpdude8

[erpdude8]

UPDATED · 6-28-2006

Please see the top of this topic for most recent updates.

_______________________________________

6-28-2006

Added 98 FE SP2 2.01 beta 1 + fast link.

Updated U918547 + U891711.

Added Flash 9.0a.

thanx MDGx. I have created the unofficial Notepad updates for Win95, 98 & ME; all three of them have fixed all of the blunders from the Notepad patches wiSHmaKeR made [his notepad patches dont work at all for win95, notepad displaying error message 'There was a failure in launching Wordpad' when trying to open 64kb or bigger files, etc.] Let me know if you need them.

and speaking of Notepad, take a look at this problem for the Win2k/XP editions of Notepad in this article:

http://bink.nu/Article7429.bink

but at least the Win95/98/ME editions of Notepad do not have the problem the Win2000/XP/2003/Vista editions of Notepad has.

Edited June 30, 2006 by erpdude8

[Petr]

and speaking of Notepad, take a look at this problem for the Win2k/XP editions of Notepad in this article:

http://bink.nu/Article7429.bink

but at least the Win95/98/ME editions of Notepad do not have the problem the Win2000/XP/2003/Vista editions of Notepad has.

The problem is in automatic recognition of Unicode text files. Notepad for Win95/98/ME is not able to handle Unicode text files at all.

Petr

[erpdude8]

The problem is in automatic recognition of Unicode text files. Notepad for Win95/98/ME is not able to handle Unicode text files at all.

However, in the Win2000/XP/2003/Vista versions of Notepad you can choose whether to save TXT files in Notepad either in ANSI Encoding or Uniccode Encoding from the Save As dialog box. From the Save As box, default encoding is set to ANSI not UNICODE. if you do the steps on that site to reproduce the problem but save the file in UNICODE format instead of ANSI format, the problem WILL occur. If you save the file in ANSI format, the problem will not happen.

[Petr]

The problem is in automatic recognition of Unicode text files. Notepad for Win95/98/ME is not able to handle Unicode text files at all.

However, in the Win2000/XP/2003/Vista versions of Notepad you can choose whether to save TXT files in Notepad either in ANSI Encoding or Uniccode Encoding from the Save As dialog box. From the Save As box, default encoding is set to ANSI not UNICODE. if you do the steps on that site to reproduce the problem but save the file in UNICODE format instead of ANSI format, the problem WILL occur. If you save the file in ANSI format, the problem will not happen.

It was just wat I read. Now I have tried to duplicate the "bug" and I'm not able to do it - in Windows XP, the file is saved as ANSI and opened as ANSI, everything as expected, so I don't know what the "bug" is about??

I have followed the steps exactly.

Petr