Wellllllll.......

I have had a slight 'holiday' - mainly because I didn't want to fight the beastie for a few days - glad I did , cause when i did do 'the fix', I wasn't tired, and it was simple...


I had worked out that MSIE 'Internet Properties' stuff and put the username and password in for the trial ISP, but things still wouldn't work - then things went 'totally berko' - couldn't type into the browser url window, do the 'Vulcan Nerve Pinch' or anything....


So today I did a fresh minimal reinstall (with a chdsk /f) over the top of 98SE, then applied the 17Mb 'unofficial upgrade'... went ok - but now I got an error saying that file type 'file' could not be run as it could not find AUTOEXEC.EXE..... !!!!!! :-) and thus NOTHING would run unless it was from an existing icon....

This IS NOT part of Windoze/DOS.... found it was needed to start a 'Trial copy' of Settlers 3!!!! did the big un-install thing... :-) fixed that!

Now Spybot S&D had installed 'Teatimer' !!! which kept on sticking its d*ck in everything, and stopping all registry changes - which would be good but the prog is so poorly designed that the standard font I use for the desktop renders Teatimer's popup windows unreadable, so i can't figure which button to press, and if you don't respond quickly, it forbids registry changes.... so did a reg-hack and killed the 'run line'!!!!

NOW.... we is OK again.... after a defrag - we seem to be al ok and speed wise ok too - and NOW the dialup works fine too... :-)