>Thanks for the detailed information, Ed. The version of W95 I have came installed on this machine as 4.00.95a direct from COMPAQ. I did the installation of IE4 from beta/release/SP1/SP2. I just installed SP2 and updated W95 for Y2K last night, and now my version for SHELL32.DLL is 4.00.955. I don't do all that much with scripting, but what I've tried, works.
>
>Someday, I'll get around to updating this machine to W98 with IE5, but right now, I just couldn't afford the downtime if it didn't work right. If I hold out long enough, I'll probably just replace the H/W when W2K is available.
>

If you don't need the backwards DOS compatibility, Win2K ships live mid-February, and it's considerably easier to deal with than NT, and will convert much of your Win9x registry to its new storage format (an upgrade from Win9x to NT 4 did not preserve the registry.) If you're concerned with backwards DOS compatibility issues (which I would assume to be the case if you've stuck with retail Win95) then the WIn98 upgrade, or Millenium when it ships next year, will be the better choice; while Win2K is more forgiving of hardware transgressions, its not much more forgiving...

>Ed, can you recommend a book on the registry? Preferibly one for all flavors of Windows (95/98/NT4/W2K)? Right now, I've pretty much avoided dealing with the registry unless absolutely necessary, but I see I can't hold out much longer. :) I'd absolutely *HATE* doing a re-install just because I didn't understand something in the registry that could be fixed manually.
>

I've got a nuber of Que books covering the registry under differing flavors, which are now all out-of-date; unfortunately, much of the interesting stuff that might prevent having to reinstall is version-specific. The registry manipulation stuff is very basic and common to all of the Win32 platforms (with notable exceptions being security issues for registry access under WinNT and Win2K; the parameters nd calls are the same for Win9x and the more secure Win32 platforms; Win9x ignores some of the parameters, making life a bit easier but also making life a bit more danger-prone.) There are a series of books "Inside the fill-in-the-Win32-flavor Registry" which are good, but they're basically two or three chapters on registry basics and tools, followed by voluminous lists of registry keys and their meanings which are subject to change seemingly at whim, and which don't cover any applications. I'd recommend the Resource Kits for the various operating systems.