Windows 98SE Explorer.exe - "invalid page fault" - can't boot

Hi all,

I have a problem with my laptop which I suspect may have something to do with installing a new PCMCIA network card and "storing" the old one in a PCMCIA slot. Here's the rundown:

As stated, I installed a new card and put the old one into the second slot for safe-keeping. I found this caused some confusion on the laptop with it not being sure which one to use to access our ADSL modem/router and thus, find its' way out to the internet and access our LAN. The old card usually took on a 169.x.x.x address and that was the one the laptop usually tried using first.

I decided after two or three times of this, that the easiest thing would be to stop procrastinating and remove the old network card and put it away properly. However, now the laptop is unable to boot into safe or normal mode without an error message which shuts down the OS before it properly starts up. The only thing I'm left with in my Task Manager (accessible with Ctrl-Alt-Del) is Apoint, which from memory is something to do with my mouse pad.

The error message is this:

The figure in brackets is one that I got after trying a couple of things; otherwise, it seems to be the same figures coming up each time.

If I try booting with the network card (either) in the laptop, the laptop hangs before bringing up the Windows splash screen and won't go any further. The above error message only shows up if I try to boot without the network card(s).

I'm able to get to the "Command Prompt Only" option and I've tried extracting a new copy of explorer.exe and booting up but that didn't work. I've googled and the information I get tends to centre around replacing explorer.exe or an Internet Explorer 5 file. Whether that would be relevant to me, given that I have installed IE6 SP1, I'm not sure.

Other information I found said that his problem had been an overly large entry in the register, which once deleted, solved his problem. I didn't follow what it was he did about it; I think he had more access than I did.

I found information that said to edit the system.ini to use winfile.exe instead of explorer.exe for the shell. This has gained me limited Windows 3 style of access but I don't know where to go from here. That person's next step was to reinstall IE 5.5 but whether reinstalling IE 6 will work for me and exactly how to go about that, has me puzzled. I seem to have some access to 98SE programs but not all of them. I can use regedit but wouldn't know what to do once there.

The old network card is a Xircom CE3B-100 according to the back of it (can't tell you what Windows says because I don't know how to access the information if it's there) and the new one is a 3Com 3CXFE575CT -AP. Both of them are 10/100 cards. The reason for getting a new one was because as far as I know, the dongle for the Xircom is broken.

Hope someone has some helpful info for me!

P.S. Don't know if it's relevant to the situation; I'm running ZoneAlarm Free, AVG Free, Spybot and Ad-aware on the laptop and it's a Pentium II 300Mhz.

 

First thing boot to the command prompt

Delete the page file, Windows will build a new on on next reboot.

c:\
cd windows
del win386.swp
restart

then repair the registry again at the command prompt


c:\
cd windows
cd command
scanreg /fix
restart

You may be able to start now in safe mode, if not using your alternate shell

either way start msconfig
c:\windows\system\msconfig.exe


Using this you will have to use trial and error to suppress the startup and win.ini until you find the culprit.

startup items can be permanently removed with regedit

HKlocalmachine\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\run

When you have it working again make at win boot floppy.



Studio T

 

I omitted to mention that I have used the Win 98SE startup disk to boot the computer. Without it, I wasn't able to extract any files. I'm currently trying to figure out why the files I need to extract to replace the suspect IE6 ones (according to further information I found) aren't accessible and will probably end up comparing them to the ones on another computer to see if I can find files with the same date/time stamp to use, since my extracting of IE6 files seems not to be working.

 

Glad you already have a startup floppy. How are you getting on with my suggestions? To do them you just switch from the A:\ drive to the C:\ drive once booted.

Studio T

 

Well, I've tried various things and so far, no success.

One of the problems I'm having is extracting copies of the appropriate dll files to try replacing the old ones with - I keep getting an error message that it can't open the first .cab file when I specify to check all .cab files. And it doesn't seem too interested in checking any .cab file. (That's the 98SE machine in command line only.)

I've resorted to looking up which files are found in which cab files using the DLLHelp site at Microsoft so I can try specifying the correct .cab file(s) to look for the dll(s) in. One question I need answered is whether it makes any difference which file I choose, when the same version of a dll is listed as being in more than one .cab file.

Can I use UltimateZip to extract the dlls I need or do I need to use a special Windows method so that they'll be usable? (I am fairly sure is the case with some files, correct me if I'm wrong there.) I'm using UltimateZip on a 2000 machine and don't know of any Windows method of extracting the dll and storing it in a folder. If using UltimateZip isn't going to work, I have the option of using a Windows method on 2000 Pro or XP Pro if needed but will need instructions.

Thanks all!

P.S. I am fairly sure that it has something to do with the network cards. If I have a network card in while I'm booting up, the computer won't boot into anything, including use the winfile.exe instead of explorer.exe. It hangs before loading the splash screen for the final time and stays stuck on the black screen previous to that. If I boot up into the winfile.exe without the network card, I can add the network card later and search our other local computers, although they can't access the laptop at the moment.

And I'm sick of not being able to use a mouse! The mouse pad driver obviously isn't being loaded and so far, I'm not having success with other external mice - one more to try when I come home from shopping!

 

Hello Chookers,

Don't fall into the trap of doing more than one 'repair' at a time.

As I understand matters,

You had a working system (albeit accessing the wrong card)
Your removed some hadware
The system stopped working


This, to me, indicates a problem to do with the driver for that hardware.

I suggested a modicum of prudent housekeeping followed by a dedicated hunt for that driver.

How did you get on?

Studio T

 

Anyone able to help with the dll part of this post? I'd already tried the scanreg/fix that Studiot suggested but tried again, with the swap file change that he suggested but that still isn't helping. I would like to have tried the scanreg/restore but unfortunately, I didn't know about that one until possibly after losing the last good one and /fix says it has worked and then the laptop still won't boot up.

So any other takers?? Please??????

 

Just curious, do you have the cab files stashed on your HD? It is a good way to install Win98SE, and it helps with the repairs.

Have you tried using the registry checker?

 

It isn't clear to me whether you are able to boot your operating system, are you able to get into Win98?

What is the make/model of the computer your fighting?

 

Hi all,

Been very busy lately and hadn't got back to this. Just to clear some backlog of clarifications needed:
--it wasn't windows cab files I was having problems with, it was IE cab files which I have on a CD. It might be that the CD hasn't had the burn closed (it was one someone made for me) and that winfile.exe (3.1 File Manager) is unable to read it. Many of the suggested solutions I was coming across wanted me to replace various IE files from the cabs.
--msconfig was unusable so I wasn't able to try supressing startup items.
--nothing that was tried made it possible to boot into Safe Mode.
--I wasn't trying multiple fixes at the same time (me not silly!); I was trying this and seeing if it worked, that and seeing if it worked, and nothing did.
--I wasn't actually able to boot the system into any mode of 98; I was using the winfile.exe as the shell instead of the usual explorer.exe. (This is done by editing the c:\windows\system.ini file.) That allows you to boot the computer using the 3.1 File Manager and that's what it looks like. (If you want to know exactly what I was using, either go "Start - Run - winfile.exe - Okay" for those with 98 or look at the attached file, and remember I had no mouse!) While booted in like this, some things worked and some didn't - mainly only the Windows games worked - highly useful things for fixing computers! Unfortunately, you need different types of files that can run in the 3.1 shell; I think I was told 3.1 is 8 bit and most of my programs that I wanted to use are 16 bit but I could have the figures wrong. Regardless, they weren't suitable.
--The laptop is an Asus L7200 - nice little machine; I really like the touchpad and the driver allows you to do almost everything you could want to with a mouse, just by using the touchpad. Very nice! (No, I haven't found a way to double-click to make Mine Sweeper playable with the touchpad! )

Anyway, I took it with me one day last week when I was taking teens to someone's place some way off where dad is a computer mega-guru and sought help. He removed all the tmp files, which I wasn't sure if they were safe to remove from info I'd seen somewhere, and also renamed the win.com file to force it through a "reinstall." That was all we had time for and then he had to dash off to the airport and I had to head home.

So I now have a laptop that can be booted normally but has various niggly problems still, some of which I have already fixed and some I'm lost with.

Some of the problems were to do with registry entries where the paths given were incorrect, which have been fixed. I think we have the same registry as before the laptop got messed up but not everything is in it that should be, it seems. There are two reasons I say this. One is because the path issues were old-style 8.3 file names being used in the registry entries, such as c:\progra~1\window~1\mplayer2.exe instead of c:\programs\windows media player\mplayer2.exe and I assume this could have been because of using the 3.1 shell, which would use 8.3 file names.

The other reason I say this is because it seems to have lost track of some installed programs whose files all seem to be intact, such as MS Office 2000. Trying to open them directly from the exes in program files is getting me different errors, depending on the program. Also, the Word quicklaunch icon has the shortcut information greyed out and I can't change it. If I use the quicklaunch icon, the Word splash screen opens up and then I get the message box about the feature I'm wanting to use not being installed and the prompt to use the CD or tell it somewhere else to look. Anyway, here are error messages I'm getting, including the error that Lotus SmartCenter 97 gives me when I try to open that:

I'm having other problems too, one of which is with shockwave and java in the browser. I'm having another go at installing shockwave later, now that I've removed ALL traces of it (as far as I know) using Ccleaner. (I used Ccleaner to look for issues and that's what I used to locate and correct the registry path errors. I also had it remove some others that I couldn't figure out what was wrong but it seemed to be that they were leftover from software removals. Except some problems which were pretty obvious (such as deleting a file and forgetting to delete the shortcut to it) I made backups of everything that Ccleaner removed using the inbuilt tool.) I don't know what to do about java.

Another issue that keeps coming up is the setnote.cpl (which is something to do with IBM ViaVoice). If I don't have it renamed to something else, every time I open the Control Panel, I get an error message about it. This is bound to be because ViaVoice is one of the "lost" installed programs.

Now, the first thing I want to know is what to do about these "lost" installed programs. Should I try to remove them somehow (they don't show up in Add/Remove) or reinstall over the top or something else?

Am I likely to have trouble with the laptop for other things if I don't back up and do a complete reinstall (which I probably will do sometime anyway because I'd like to change the partitioning) or can I get everything sorted out by reinstallations, such as the shockwave and java which are a being a headache?

Anything else anyone think I might need to deal with?

Oh, I almost forgot. I'm not sure if I uninstalled AVG and Ad-aware but there isn't any sign of either of those anywhere.

Well, that's a "screed" and a half so I'll leave it there I think!

Thanks all!

 

Oh, by the way... I meant to say that the guru who looked at the laptop and listened to the tale of woe, said it probably had nothing to do with the network cards or their drivers. He said it looks more like something as stupid as Windows mistakenly trying to install IE7 and mucking things up. Also, it doesn't seem to have had anything to do with viruses.

So who knows. But it would explain why repairing it was impossible if Windows did try to install IE7.