Win 98 won't boot at all

[pinhead]

I've got a win98 system that will not boot into windows. It comes to the box where you select which profile you want to use and after that, the taskbar flashes up and it just stops. If you hit Ctrl Alt Del, nothing is running in the background (not even explorer). I tried starting in safe mode & the same thing happens. When the system stops, if you hit the windows key on the keyboard, I get an illegal operation with kernel32 and USER.EXE. I Checked to make sure that explorer.exe was the shell and it is. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank in advance for any help and have a great friggin Monday.

[DocPC]

Does that happen to be an Asrock K7VM2 board?

[pinhead]

Does that happen to be an Asrock K7VM2 board?

Actually No, It's An Intel D850MV Board.

[DocPC]

Actually No, It's An Intel D850MV Board.

Ok, just checking. I have 3 machines here now with the same issue, all the same Asrock board.

This happened right after they did ALL the windows updates at the same time.

Still trying to figure it out. It won't load an earlier registry.

[MobilePCPhysician]

Ok, just checking. I have 3 machines here now with the same issue, all the same Asrock board.

This happened right after they did ALL the windows updates at the same time.

Still trying to figure it out. It won't load an earlier registry.

Try starting with option 4, Step by step confirmation. Don't let anything start that is not absolutely necessary. Usually, a vxd from either Mcafee or Symantec is to blame.....

[geoscomp]

and since it's win98, you can do a system file check to see if any of your windows files are corrupt, and replace them if they are

[Tekboy]

and since it's win98, you can do a system file check to see if any of your windows files are corrupt, and replace them if they are

My understanding is that this machine will not boot to a GUI even in Safe Mode. Are you saying that SFC can be run from a command prompt?

I agree that the System File Checker in Win98 is a wonderful tool, but I have never been able to run it outside of a GUI.

[arch0nmyc0n]

Well I found that when windows won't load like that, I have found that altering the SHELL=explorer.exe in SYSTEM.INI to SHELL=progman.exe will usually allow me to bring up the old windows 3.1 interface. From there I can usually run things like driver updates, SFC, MSCONFIG, Spybot, and most importantly the IE 6 SP1 installer to reinstall it. Old MS programs to the rescue! YAY!