>>>Now this last zip fails with the message:
>>>
>>>"XMS version 2 detected Using normal compression DOS verify is off" (or so I'm told by the user).
>>>
>>>Can anyone shed some light on what the problem is all of a sudden?
>>
>>There may be some settings in the .pif file it uses. Pkzip is, IIRC, a 16-bit app, so it needs some of them. Now I don't know what .pif file - is it some fox.pif, or did Windows create a pkzip.pif, beats me.
>
>Aye I may get to look into that - if I can figure which too :-)
>
>>
>>Anyway, in the w9x days there were such settings in .pif files, where you could tell Windows how to emulate XMS (or EMS, if you prefer that) for your DOS app. Didn't need to touch that under NT4 or later, so I'll whistle the rest (*).
>
>Beats me though why this was working up till recently

Anything could have changed a few system settings - maybe a "system is running low on virtual memory" or any other situation, and now it doles out less memory for those low grade tasks? I wish I knew.

Good luck digging this one out. You'll need it :).