>I installed IE 5.01 on my Win95 computer but my old shell32.dll was not updated. I tried copying one from Win98 and it blew up as I thought it probably would. If I create any apps that use the newer shell features, other Win95 folks will have the same problem. Any ideas?
>

MS never provided an easy upgrade path for people starting with retail Win95; the surest way to add it was to install IE4 with Active Desktop. I've also had good results buy applying SP1 and then installing the self-installing WSH executable which can be downloaded from msdn.microsoft.com/scripting

IE5 did not include the Active Desktop components in Shell version 4.71, but it may have installed the necessary providers for Shell.Application - the easiest way to check is to see if there's a registry key for HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Shell.Application present - if so, then the necessary SHDOC?? DLLs installed successfully.

NT systems got the needed Shell components with SP3.

If you have a Win95 system prior to OSR 2 without Shell.Application, the best way to upgrade is to install IE4 and then IE5 - this will add the needed components in all cases. For your needs, IE4 or later is needed to access the InternetExplorer object; NetScape will not work in this context.