Recently installed 98SE OEM over 95 OSR 2 OEM. Added IE6 SP1, DirX9c. Following advice in this forum, I downloaded 98Lite Preview to get back to the 95 Explorer.... And, well, the 98Lite.net forum and knowledge base don't appear to be available for a couple a days now, so I am tossing this out to anyone who may have experienced this and knows what to do:

In shell swap, 98Lite appears to extract the shell files from my 95 CD, but it hangs in "phase 1" of "force compatibility", leaving only wordpad.exe on the screen. Actually, I don't use wordpad, and I have tried this with 98 Wordpad installed and uninstalled with the same result.

Anyone know what's wrong? Is there any reason to do this anyway, or should I just manually put the 95 shell components in? How about old 98Lite scripts/infs that will show me what to do manually?

Thanks for all the help in advance!

copy all the files in the "\Win98" directory ONLY on your
Windows 98 or 98SE CD to your the directory containing 98lite
(do not copy the CHANNELS, OLS, TOUR or CONTENT subdirectories
or their contents)

· if you intend installing 98micro or 98lite with the higher
performance and lighter weight Windows 95 Explorer Shell
desktop option (called the SLEEK desktop option in the
installer) you will also need to copy the following three
Windows 95 files to the setup files directory:

EXPLORER.EXE
SHELL32.DLL
COMDLG32.DLL

These need to come from an original Windows 95 CDROM; 95a, or
95b -- Windows 95c has integrated IE4 so files from 95c are
not compatible. All three files should have version numbers in
the form 4.00.XXXX (NOT 4.72.XXXX or later) in the file
properties dialog

· once the final Setup directory has all files copied to it,
98lite will make a \98lite subdirectory to store the Windows 95
shell and patched files so they will not need to be recopied
or patched again (you may reuse this install directory again
and again to clean reinstall Windows

· If you are not installing or re-configuring multiple systems,
or do not require fast "Shell Swapping" you may safely delete
this 98lite subdirectory and all the files it contains; 98lite
will make it again whenever you install/reinstall the SLEEK
Windows 95 desktop option keeping it saves the extra steps and
makes "Shell Swapping" as a rapidly re-configurable option
HTH

Hi oscardog,
thanks for replying, i have done what the instructions ask, and like I said, it seems to have no trouble getting the 95 versions of the shell files off of my CD, just hangs in the "force conversion" phase. It creates the 98lite subdirectory. After running it once ( and having it hang ) the directory is there but is empty. Running again, it doesn't bother to get the shell files from the CD, moves straight on to the "force conversion" and hangs again, same place. If I quit out at this point, the shell files are in the subdirectory ( where did they come from? ) and I don't see Wordpad or Notepad anywhere. I tried to manually add them from my 95 installation but that didn't seem to help.

The only thing weird about my options\cab directory is that my CD is damaged in cab38. So, I manually extracted the files in 37, 38 and 39 ( because I can't copy cab38 from the CD and some files span to cabs 37 and 39 ) and they are extracted into the directory while the three cabs are missing. There was only one file in cab 38 that would not extract, so I added it in manually with the extracted files. So perhaps the script in 98lite is looking for one of those cabs and can't find it.... that's why I was wondering if anyone had the old inf's from an older manual procedure so I can see what's wrong. Or just bypass it and do it manually.

Any ideas? Maybe I'll add the cab37 and cab39 back to the directory on the off chance that it's not cab38 that's being looked for. I will try to work on it later today and repost. thanks for your help, gave me some ideas...

Well, here I am posting in my "own" thread again, in case someone else has this problem and searches it on MSFN, here is what I found out. First, I was wrong about deskw95, it is part of W98SE distribution and not 98Lite. I couldn't see it for the same reason that 98Lite was having trouble installing:

Windows install usually looks for files in the install directory, not finding them I believe it uses the layout.inf files to determine which cab to extract from. This is a robust way of finding the file, even if one cab at the beginning of the chain is damaged, it doesn't affect the others. Yes, the cabs form a chain, a doubly linked list is implemented in the header of each cab file. And this is where you can have problems if a cab file is damaged and has been replaced with its contents as 2 of mine have been. The other way to get files from the cabs is to follow the chain, searching for the correct file name, this is also a good way to do it if you don't want or need to parse the layout.inf files because each Windows distribution has a different cab file layout. This is the way the DOS extract command also works.

The solution was to change the headers of the cab files on either side of the gap to point to each other rather than the missing files. In addition there is a "serial number" like feature in each cab file in the chain and these must be sequential or "Extract" will refuse to follow the chain. It is a (byte??) value at offset 22h in the cab file. So I had to hack these as well in all the cab files after the missing ones.

so my apologies to Shane Brooks and 98Lite, their software is not broken
although it would be nice if their knowledge base and FAQ were up...

SHELL32.DLL replacement
Well, here is the part that I hope will be interesting to 98 fans on this site. Although 98 lite ran without a hitch, I still couldn't get the "Sleek" option to work. Reason being, it used the 98 version of shell32.dll not the 95 version, now I could easily have caused this with all the shuffling of dll's this week. But this got me thinking, what is the relationship between these two patches? What if someone installs 98lite and reverts to the 95 shell32, then installs the 98 shell32 patch ( so that if one goes back to chubby mode, everything will work ). Does the shell32 patch recognize this correctly? Reason I bring it up is that this is the order recommended in at least one post and I don't recall any comments on it. Any takers?