Yes! Welcome home.
When you browse around here you'll see that the work has gone on. Lately I've had difficulties with some of the combinations of all of these seperate works. Seperately, fine. Put 'em together and 98SE blows up on me. Heh.
It'll be fantastic if you can get your pack up to date with the more recent fixes. I'm happy to hear that things have stabilized for you and that you will once again have the time to do computer stuff. All here sure have appreciated your previous contributions and have been hoping to see you back here posting and working on keeping 98SE alive and well.
One piece of magic that your Service Pack does is install "components of Dialup Networking 1.4." In a somewhat mystical way it avoids the included installation of Virtual Private Networking stuff. If we install Dialup Networking from the Microsoft setup, we need to go into Windows Setup in add/remove and uncheck VPN, then go into Networking and remove the VPN related files as well. Somehow your pack avoids all that.
If you could let Soperific (the Autopatcher thread) know how you do this it would help his project, which is pretty darned amazing as it is.
I've also noticed that other packages that include the updated Explorer.exe do not include the whole desktop icon set that your pack includes. I've got a Windows Me theme that includes the whole set, but somehow your Explorer.exe provides them as the default desktop icons.
Perhaps you could share information on how this is done as well.
It would be nice to have the option of switching back and forth from the new icons to the older default desktop icons too. Sometimes I like to go retro! Unfortunately the older icons are no longer available once the newer Explorer.exe is installed.
Regarding the Windows2000 color scheme, is there a way to avoid changing the fonts? I like the scheme but hate the look of the fonts and would rather keep the default Windows 98 classic looking fonts in the title bars, etc. I've tried tinkering a bit with Display Properties but get confused trying just to change the fonts back to normal in all the different places they appear.
The only other thing I recall about the features of the pack is the needed watching of the installation order of Microsoft Office. If I install Office 2000 it needs to be done before the Service Pack but if I install OfficeXP it needs to be installed after the Service Pack. Not doing it in that order results in a botched system as MDAC registry entries and files get all messed up. Either Windows starts repairing the registry in a loop or even if it does startup it is messed up. At least I think it's related to MDAC files. I don't think your pack installs MDAC but it must install something that causes this reaction. Just to let you know, if I use Word2000 it's with WorksSuite2001, then I install WorksSuite2005 without Word so I can keep Word2000, and if I use the later version it's from WorksSuite 2005 without Word installed, then installing the full Office XP Pro Plus and then going back and installing the Word addin for WorksSuite. I also update to Works 8.5 and the updated Word addin and install the Office Updates.
That all goes smoothly by the way! This way I only use OfficeXP on my one Windows XP installation but still get to use Word 2000 as well as the Works Suite 2005 programs on my 98 system. No activation hastles that way. I can just activate OfficeXP over the internet as it stays on the same XP installation all the time, but I can still use all the other newer software, albeit with Word 2000, on 98!
I hope it's okay to provide this kind of feedback at this point. I was concerned that if you were going ahead and getting back to work on these things, you should be made aware of stuff like this.
Glad to have you back here, and here's hoping all goes well for you!
