I was reading various penny sized win98 installations (nano98, 98lite) and I figuered, why go through the trouble getting the 95 files when you can use progman.exe? it works to my test though I only gotten down to 6 MB, which, is still pretty good. I decided to do a web search on progman but found no one has any interest in it what so ever!

I mean, it can't be that bad! I would use it over explorer any day!
So Im deciding to make it more "windows 98 friendly", but I ran into a few problems. being that you can't make shortcuts I have to take an explorer link and "start in" the various dirs but I can't figure out the important ones!

The ones I'm missing are:

Network Neiborhood
Control Panel
Dial Up Networking
and Scheduled Tasks.


also if anyone knew how to shrink vmm32.dll being that it takes up one floppy itself. Would I be able to use the 98 fe if its smaller, or for that matter, 95 (a b or c)?

also this filelist, is all of the empty dirs really necessary? Im sure ill find out myself but it wouldn't hurt to ask.

It's just a shame I can't use things like RP lite with it

Apart from Scheduled Tasks (C:\WINDOWS\TASKS), those aren't real dirs. They are 100% virtual folders also called namespace extensions. They are all created by one or another dll and injected in the namespace structure :

Desktop
My Computer
Drives

The first two are created by Shell32.dll AFAIK. The other two need DUN and Task Scheduler installed respectively to be created and exist I think.

When they exist as a CLSID in the registry, even if their icons are removed from the namespace in My Computer, links to them can be created by using folders with special names :

Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}
My Network Places.{208D2C60-3AEA-1069-A2D7-08002B30309D}
Dial-Up Networking.{992CFFA0-F557-101A-88EC-00DD01CCC48}
Scheduled tasks.{D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF}

The text is optional. If created with only .{GUID Number}, you'll get working nameless icons.

Control Panel can also be launched using the following command :

C:\WINDOWS\CONTROL.EXE

Not sure any of it is helpfull for what you are doing.

wow thanks. it worked.

allright what you do is when you add new item you add the CLSID to the end of explorer as shown below

Description : Network Neighborhood
Command Line : C:\WINDOWS\EXPLORER.EXE ::{208D2C60-3AEA-1069-A2D7-08002B30309D}
Working Directory : (Leave Blank)

Program Manager was a very useful app in the Windows 3.x days. Might be a good alternative to using the Start menu (then again maybe not).

See MS articles 116245 & 142255 on using Program Manager in Win9xME and any issues with it:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/116245/en-us
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/142255/en-us