[RESOLVED] Win95 OSR2 hangs after accessing Control Panel

[MichaelD]

I am having a problem with my system hanging after accessing Control Panel in Windows 95 OSR2. I do not get any error messages, and the mouse is still functional. But I cannot use any of the desktop icons or the Start button, and the three finger salute will not shut down the system. You can click "Shut Down", but the system will not shut down and after 2 or 3 tries, even this dialog box won't appear any more.
Computer is a custom built system with Asus motherboard, 64MB Ram, K6-233 CPU, AWE64 sound card, 24X/16X CD-ROMs, internal Zip drive, Mouse Systems optical mouse, and Aurora video card. The system has run fine for 1.5 years without any problems. I am hoping someone has run into this problem and there is a simple solution that does not involve reinstalling everything.

[userfriendly]

sorry bud,

I too had a similar experience where it the computer hangs under control panel. I run a pentium 233 MMX system with 64 mb Sdram, Abit tx5 board, sb16, ati 3d rage 4mb pci and voodoo2, etc. Except I use win 95 osr 2.5. It seemed to happen to me when I installed the beta version of IE 5.0, big mistake! Because of that, It would always hang my control panel when I was trying to access the add/remove programs panel. I had to reinstall and everthing worked fine after that. Besides, It's recommended to reformat and reinstall your o/s at least once a year just to remove any old files or potential errors. Just start fresh again. Sounds like you haven't reinstalled your system at all for the past 1.5 years.

[confus-ed]

If "three fingers" don't work then it's crashed, if contol panel is the only culprit it sounds like you have a device conflict, you can try & fix this in safe mode, but you can't see the conflict! so guesswork but delete anything you know you definately haven't got. If it was meant to be there windows will redect on next reboot.

Any more info?

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[MichaelD]

Well I didn't have anything in the system that wasn't supposed to be there.

So I went ahead and deleted everything off the C: drive and reinstalled everything. Everything's working OK again. Had a bit of a problem with the CD-ROM drivers trying to take control of the Zip drive, but got that problem resolved fairly quickly. Thanks guys.