Win98 not shutting down

I get a GPF whenever I attempt to shut down Win98. This is a new development, no new programs have been loaded. If I go past the blue screen with a ctr-alt-del I get the Windows logo screen with a "Windows is shutting down" phrase and it'll sit there forever.

Any ideas what's up? How to fix it?

Thanks!

 

Here is a list of articles if you wish to go through them http://support.microsoft.com/common...search&sz=w98shutdown&cdid=en-us-kb&lcid=1033

First question, is what A/V program are you using, along with what the BSOD states when you get it?

 

Thank you for the link, I'll go browse there.

I run Norton's antivirus.

What is BSOD? Are you asking for the text of the error message? I had initially said it's a GPF. In reality, it says "A fatal error has occurred at . . ." and then some string of letters and numbers. I must admit that I've never paid attention to whether this is always the same location.

I downloaded a patch I found at computerhope.com which addressed the issue and the machine actually did shut down after I installed the patch, but only the one time. Subsequent shut-downs caused it to hang again.

A possibly related situation is that start-up has become much, much slower and this happened concurrently with the shut-down problem. I've disabled all unnecessary TSRs (or whatever they're called in Windows) without any noticeable change in the start-up time.

I appreciate your response and your interest in this problem.

 

BSOD= "Blue Screen Of Death". Next time it happens, write down what it says and post here, that will help in knowing what is causing it. Personally Win98 has problems out of the box, if you can get a copy of WinNT, or even Win2k at a decent price for this machine, I would.

If it is capable of WinXP, that is even better.

 

I'd skip the WinNT (3.5, 3.51, 4). Unless this was a buisiness machine.

Do you have all the updates installed from MS? Critical and otherwise. There was a fix that addressed this, if I recall correctly.

 

Ah yes, that Blue Screen. On it, it says, "A fatal exception OE has occurred at 0028:00000004 . . ." I did install the MS updates as far as they were available. I also went through the URL you had posted earlier and downloaded and installed a shut-down fix. What happens now is that I get the Fatal Exception message, I hit 'any key', and it will eventually shut down.

The machine would take XP. My concern is that the programs I'm running now on 98 wouldn't work on XP and I'd have spent a ton of money to upgrade them. I've never done an OS upgrade (other than moving from DOS) and I don't know what happens with the programs.

 

brownizs, don't leave me . . . We had a good thing going, can we move forward?

I ran scandisk and defrag in safe mode, also NAV and AdAware. I disabled all non-essential startup items. It shuts down ok, albeit slowly, from safe mode. It also shuts down ok after a normal startup. It hangs on subsequent shutdowns. The fatal exception occurs at 0028:0000004. You said one could tell from that what causes the problem.

Any ideas?

 

NAV has been known to cause errors with Win98, along with McAffee, especially the newer versions that have been written for Win2k & WinXP. I would try the Free version of AVG from Grisoft, and start there. Also make sure that the memory on the motherboard is still properly seated, especially if the machine has been in a move recently.

Fatal Exception OE is more of a third party issue, and has been known to be caused by Virus software.

 

The culprit was ZoneAlarm.

In retrospect, the shut-down problems, BSOD with fatal exceptions, the very slow startup, the 'tvdumpf lags' command which suddenly appeared in my autoexec.bat, all began when I allowed the free version of ZA to go home and upgrade itself to a newer (free) version. When I researched the 'tvdumpf lags' command I read of many others who experienced sudden problems with their machines regardless of operating system.

I uninstalled ZA and now I'm good to go. Thanks, brownizs, for the third party tip.