To one and all, After my latest experience with MS, thought everyone might be interested in the situation:
Just so all know, I am using my older system yet, which has 98SE on it, which turns out is very important for the following. I tried, and it seems quite UNSUCCESSFULLY, doing the upgrade/update from IE 5.5 to 6, from the MS update page for 98 - when I tried doing it, I ended up with some issues that developed during the download, and later the install itself. Turns out it was a ROYAL disaster. I called up MS, and after explaining what had just happened, was given an 800 number to call for 98 support - since it has been LONG gone since this was originally installed, I thought it was going to cost me plenty. Turns out I did not have to pay for the service call - was given a service number, and ended up talking to, overall, several techs. Am not 100% sure exact WHAT happened, but when I tried to open ANY 98 item (control panel, explorer, my computer, IE, etc, etc, etc), I would immediately get a error box come up that explorer had caused a fatal page exception. When you would open the detail box, it would show explorer had caused the error in kernal32 - TOTALLY WONDERFUL!!! Had to go into safe mode, get back to IE 5.5, and then go from there. Next, had to go through MSCONFIG and finally limit which items were getting loaded from the startup group, to finally get things to work properly. Had this happen occationally since, and had to do a cold boot to get things to work properly. A couple of things though came out of this whole thing that I found VERY interesting and effect everyone it would seem, especially after the recent trend about the VM: 1) Several of the techs told me, when I asked if I should attempt again with IE for Win98, to try to upgrade to IE 6.0, to NOT upgrade to 6 - for the Win9x versions of the OS, that the ONLY recommended IE is 5.5. It seems that 6 was released to correct issues in the 2K/XP engines. So even though 6 is showing up on the update pages for 98 and ME, and recomended to get, DO NOT GET IT!!! 2) The other issue which was even more interesting was the issue with the VM. I told the tech I was having problems with pages dealing with the whole issue as things stood with IE, and finally had to go to the Sun web page to get their version of Java VM for IE, to stop web pages from giving me messages boxes popping up on the screen about Java issues (this also was happening to other friends of mine as well I found) - what could I do to get the MS version of the VM??? What he told me was REAL interesting - he said due to the court issues that came up with the MS vs Sun case, there is NO MS version of the VM. That the ONLY version of the VM that can be gotten and used, no matter what the version of IE, is the version that is gotten and installed from the Sun web download page. This last is a TOTAL surprise and the opposite of what I thought was the case, since I thought that MS has release a SP1a for XP just to deal with this whole VM issue - the SP1 was updated to include the VM and is now version 1 if not included and 1a if included. Apparently, the VM being included, based on the tech's comment, is the one directly from Sun. So I guess the VM, like the QuickTime, RealPlayer, Flash, Shockwave, and other similar PlugIns for IE (as well as Netscape), will end up being supplied totally from the originator rather than MS. After this experience, and what I ended up getting told by the techs, I would be VERY interested in comments from those on the list, ESPECIALLY with IE 6 showing as something to get for 98 but, in reality, NOT!!!! 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 =====================================================
