I've got a win-98se system that boots ok most times but sometimes immediately after all the desktop icons are rendered I'll get a blue-screen "Fatal Exception OE" message. When I hit a key, the desktop comes back, the icons are flashed/rendered once or twice, and then the blue screen comes back.

This exact sequence happens in safe mode as well.

It basically gets stuck in a loop where it shows the Fatal Exception message, then you hit a key to see the desktop come back, then at the very moment the desktop looks ready for use the blue-screen fatal exception 0E comes back.

When started with the logging turned on, the very last line in bootlog.txt is something like "enumerated microsoft kernel audio mixer".

Scandisk with full surface scan turns up no errors.

Scanreg also says nothing is wrong with the registry, and restoring several older versions of the registry does not make this problem go away.

I'll power it down for a day or overnight, then turn it on and it will usually boot and work fine.

Any ideas?

PS: Is there any way to turn logging on (create bootlog.txt) for a safe-mode startup?

win.com /B /D:M

> win.com /B /D:M

The /B argument is either wrong, or undocumented.

The above command (when typed in as written) results in a safe-mode startup, but an error saying something like "can't find" or "can't run" the file "/B".

But in any case, it does seem to create a bootlog.txt file.

And BTW, is it normal to see these entries:

[0015EDFE] Starting Unknown (HTREE\ROOT\0)
[0015EDFE] Started Unknown (HTREE\ROOT\0)
[0015EDFE] Enumerating Unknown (HTREE\ROOT\0)
[0015EDFE] Enumerated Unknown (HTREE\ROOT\0)

I'm also seeing lots of these font load errors:

LoadStart = C:\WIN98\fonts\MARLETT.TTF
LoadFail = C:\WIN98\fonts\MARLETT.TTF Failure code is 0016

The following is the last few lines of my safe-mode bootlog.txt:

LoadSuccess = USER.EXE
LoadStart = MSGSRV32.EXE
LoadSuccess = MSGSRV32.EXE
Init = Final USER
InitDone = Final USER
Init = Installable Drivers
InitDone = Installable Drivers
Init = TSRQuery
InitDone = TSRQuery
[0015F051] Starting Unknown (HTREE\RESERVED\0)
[0015F051] Started Unknown (HTREE\RESERVED\0)
[0015F052] Enumerating Unknown (HTREE\RESERVED\0)
[0015F052] Enumerated Unknown (HTREE\RESERVED\0)

Are these unknown entries caused by the /b startup option?

The /B switch already worked with W3.1. It seems to be undocumented for W9x, but I found this about W95:However, it seems any extra parameter triggers bootlog.txt. Win /D:M creates a bootlog.txt for me.
This also contains your last 4 lines.