To one and all, I got a MAJOR problem develop yesterday, and have no idea what is the best solution to the issue. The base system is Win98SE.
Last week, after making a bad decision to change my software firewall (it and WinPoet did NOT get along), I uninstalled it, and ended up with the problem of being able to connect to my ISP using either dial-up or DSL BUT not get to any web site or get any emails. After a number of calls to Earthlink tech support, support personel in both areas, and doing a TON of things on my system, including editing the registry, getting rid of DLLs, reinstalling windows com software, again and again and again, and the result of something in windows got royally hosed, I finally had to reinstall my whole system. BUT, for some weeks, a number of times when I would restart my system, I would get the message that windows found errors in the registry, and would have to fix the registry. So it would shut down, restore and backup the registry in dos, and then restart windows. This was most unusual, since it was happening on a fairly regular basis. Last night after I got the system reinstalled, and working great, I went to Microsoft's update page, to download the Win98 updates - talk about a shock, since the whole site for 98 updates now looks a LOT like that for 2K and XP. Along with things I dont like now, compared to before. But that is neither good or bad. The problem was after I downloaded all the security updates, except that for getting IE6, installing, and then restarting, I got the windows has found a problem with the registry, and has to fix it - this was TOTALLY weird since to that point, with a new install, everything was working great. Ok, go to restart, and then windows came up. DISASTER!!!! There had not been any registry backups to refer to, with a new install, so not sure WHAT windows did BUT the system, when it came up, looked like not one driver or related software had been installed previously. The desktop had the right icons, BUT most of software would not work right, due to the hosing of the registry. No video drivers, sound card drivers, com software, nothing!!!! So I had to spend the day doing, again, a total new reinstall of Win98SE. So now the system is working correctly. *** BUT *** now I am where I was last night - back to trying to now figure out what to do with the updates issue. Since this whole issue has never happened before, I would always check and install all the latest, updates, especially with security related ones, this whole problem has me stumped of how to handle the whole issue, since I sure do NOT want to spend another day repeating today again. I know I can backup the registry system.dat and user.dat files, to make sure I have a working registry. BUT the bigger problem is what could have happened to begin with, and how to prevent again??? By the way, the site showed 15 security updates to download, and I let it download all of them at one time - should I have actually done them one or two at a time??? Since my new computer is going to have a dual-boot of 98SE and 2K Pro on it, I DEFINITELY want to avoid anything like this happening again, believe me. Any help in how to deal with this issue??? Ralph ============= PCWorks Mailing List ================= Don't see your post? Check our posting guidelines & make sure you've followed proper posting procedures, http://pcworkers.com/rules.htm Contact list owner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Unsubscribing and other changes: http://pcworkers.com =====================================================
