>Thank-you, I appreciate the advice.
>1) The person owning these machines is on jury duty for the next 3 days. I will email him and try to isolate this. I will reply to this as soon as I can.
>a) I sent him a small utility that disables EVERYTHING on start up except explorer. That didn't work either.
>b) These are the only machines on the system.
>c) He doesn't have any problems with any other software and the system is stable otherwise.
>d) Ruled out video (generic vga tried and failed).
>e) Ruled out safe mode (failed)
If you can't get it to run correctly under Safe Mode, the issue is not with drivers in any case. Safe Mode doesn't load any drivers from CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT, WIN.INI or the Registry; it uses base common drivers for everything. There are still issues with software, primarily versioning issues for many of the common components.
I'm assuming that your application was installed with a Setup Wizard generated install, and that you've already updated Setup Wizard from Microsoft's Web site. If that isn't the case, check to make sure that all the shared components listed in the .DEP file in DISTRIB.SRC were upgraded to appropriate versions. All kinds of things could be wrong if incorrect versions of the shared OLE, MFC and MSVC libraries are present.
>f) Boot w/o network (failed)
>g) I will get these answers next:
> 1) Can you run once fully without error.
> 2) Hardware - Gateway 100 and Gateway 166. I will find out the exact models and visit the Gateway web site. Maybe I can get a listing of the equipment.
Both are fairly old machines; gateway is not likely to have the details of the configuration on-line, but given the serial number of the machine, Gateway can tell you -EXACTLY- which components were shipped with the system orinally, and what, if any, add-ons were ordered from gateway for those systems. They keep a pretty impressive database on each machine they ship.
> 3) I'll ask him to email me a copy of win.ini, system.ini, config.sys and autoexec.bat.
>
>My email is
glmi-10@x2.alliance.net if that works better for you. I also don't want to appear to kick a gift horse in the mouth. You've given me alot I can look at already and I may just go with this the way it is. The extra hard drive idea is real smart. A fresh install on a new hard drive that I can format and send to him really sounds interesting. I'm sure I can find one around here I can send.
It's one way of knowing exactly what went on for components. If you do this, the following will make life much easier when installing the new drive:
Format the drive without using MaxBlast, EZ-Drive or other drive overlay software. It's one more thing to confuse matters.
Use FAT16, even though it isn't optimal, it is universally readable. FAT32 requires booting from a boot disk for Win95 OSR2.x or Win98.
Format the drive, and then copy the Win95 setup directory onto the hard drive in its own directory. Run Win95 Setup from the directory you make on the hard drive. This way, your end-user won't be at a total loss if the CD-ROM driver is different than the one you use during install, or his CD ROM drive letter is different, or Win95 can't initially detect the CD ROM drive at all. Win95 will be able to fix up the motherboard and various other common drivers from the .CAB files on the hard drive, so even if you install on another kind of machine in your office, it's likely that Win95 will be able to fix itself up with a few reboots once in the new system at the customer site.
Good luck!
Ed
