As the NFL keeps trying to make itself a religion - Sunday is the 'fun day' - well, upgrades are always . . a fun day. This is what I mean. Windows 2000 and XP seemed interesting. I had both for some time, and never installed. I always . . feared the hassle of incompatibilities, time to fix, time to research, etc, etc. And my fear was in no way misplaced. Ultimately, I 'repaired' my fresh Windows 2000 install. That had been the subject of my last article. The 'repair' essentially removed most every setting and installation I'd had. Then I ultimately reformatted the drive and completely reinstalled Windows 2000. No matter what, by some point, the darned thing was crashing with 'memory' errors. But the memtest tool, run off of floppy, showed no memory errors.

Sometimes, a memory error doesn't mean there's an error in memory. The routines and libraries were calling the wrong thing. So I have it working. It's unstable. I still haven't figured out what's not working. But it mostly sort of works, and particularly for some key apps.

But I was ambitious. So, the heck with an obsolete Win2000, I said. NT 5. On to NT 5.1, XP. (I think with the bad publicity for Vista, Microsoft is eager to move on with Windows-7, but they are going to identify it as - NT 6.1 - NT, the OS that wouldn't die). It seemed outfits, now gone and orphaning their wares, were more eager to update for 98SE - a fairly successful operating system - than for Win2000 SP4. But XP? That's only recently been proposed for the orphanage by Microsoft. So, I thought it might be easier to find compatibility, the latest apps and drivers, and so on.

So, yet another drive, another format, and on went XP. Activation went fine - I'd heard horror stories. I had SP2 on a second disk, from Microsoft. But for all the downloaded updates, Microsoft didn't have the brains to update their "sfc /scannow" utility which was still looking at the original D: CD-ROM, and couldn't find the files it needed. I changed a registry entry from D: to C:, copied the whole bloomin i386 directory from the original XP disk, and sfc worked fine. But . . darned. Microsoft - pick up the ball. Get in the game. This was a known problem. People shouldn't have to spend time researching why they get a slew of error messages from sfc.

You get Windows - and you gotta become some insider Microsoft systems programmer! just to get the thing to run or update. What the . . ?

Microsoft should be paying its customers for being on staff.

So apart from some continuing problems with ASUS system-level drivers and both 2000 and XP, updates were going fine. And then I made the mistake of copying over an app that didn't require install. You just unpacked from zip, and ran the app. Guess what!

CRASH! BSOD! And the blue-screen disappeared so quickly on reboot that I can't even see what it says. Something cryptic, I'm sure. One has to get into the Control Panel, System, Advanced tab and the Startup/Recovery button to turn off, Auto Restart. And keep the dump 'small', because the 'full' memory dump takes a lot of time.

So, okay, I said. XP needs a specific install. It must be tracking the running apps, somehow, by internals, or id, or filesize, or something. But I clicked then on some old practically-DOS-era apps, just to see. And they booted up just fine. An old Spirograph app, a Japanese kaleidoscope pattern maker, and some other thing. But then I hit another of these and - CRASH, BSOD, reboot. No consistency.

Dang!

Oh well, I said, a lot of the other apps had installed. So I went to an old MIDI app, a really neat orphanware package that the author had sent me with his own id as registration. It was so old it was on floppy disk. So, ran the install on floppy and - that's right - CRASH, BSOD, reboot. The thing ran just fine in Win2000.

This XP was looking less and less stable all the while. And I'd already successfully run SP2.

Oh well, I said. I hadn't downloaded the latest from Microsoft. SURELY, that . . would go well. So the update site recommended SP3, which consisted of a bunch of updates, IE7, and Winplayer 11. Okay, I said. I'll run the updates unattended, and take a moment for a film - the Eastwood movie about the Asian gang and how 'real men talk', etc. I got back, saw my screen - virus. I thought - a virus! There were blocks of random junk on the screen. And the system appeared to be hung. Well, it wasn't. The system wasn't frozen. I was able to close out of IE. And I was able to shut down, after some delay.

But oh the wonder upon reboot. Immediately, chkdsk started to run. It said - you don't want to run? Press any key. I looked for the any key . . no, I pressed a whole bunch of keys. And sure enough, chkdsk ran. It's a Core 2 with a fast FSB on a 100MB partition. Fifteen minutes. No errors. Reboot.

Guess what - it runs chkdsk a second time. No errors. And up comes Win XP with a whole bunch of error messages. Suddenly, I don't have a pagefile in my root directory. And there were a bunch of other messages about some directory $MFT, I assume some temp directory. That wasn't on the disk. And neither was the pagefile.sys that I'd seen there in the root directory, before. I went to the Advanced tab from the System icon in the Control Panel. Pagefile is just the latest in the virtual memory gimic Windows has had since I used 3.1. There was a setting. I set it. But it just kept saying - 0 used. I set it again. Nothing.

So, going to my Microsoft cubicle - or should have been - I poured through the company documents as it were and discovered that this is just what happens when you allow Microsoft to automatically install ie7 on your brand new XP SP2. When they say - Microsoft IS . . a virus . . really, they're not kidding. Apparently, the problem has to do with a 'malware' update acting like a startup or boottime virus check. If not that, then some other app. Hijack This may have a bootup app, or maybe Sypbot, something like that. If XP was installed, and then SP2 installed from a separate Microsoft CD, it seems that you must either use the stand-alone ie7 or have to get Microsoft to send you the SP3 CD.

And it left quite a mess. One immediate step was to turn off file indexing. That took a while because Windows literally goes through every file on disk to turn this feature, or bug, on or off. By this time, copying over a lot of data, I had over 160 thousand files on the HD. That worked for a couple of boots. And then $MFT, where are you, messages started to show again. And pagefile, Windows just wouldn't create one. So - of course - uninstalled ie7. Boot, shutdown, boot, and there was pagefile, and no more mention of $MFT - just a real lasting fear of . . ie7, let me tell ya.

For both Win2000 and XP, by the way, I'd read to disable the messenger service. Guess what happens when you have new installations? You get bugged by one outfit selling - regnow. NEVER . . buy regnow. They seem to be the only outfit using Windows messenger, just to scare you. So, Administrator Tools, Services, and disable Messenger.

I did use HiJack This 2.0.2. It picked out, in Windows 2000 a day after fresh install, the wmnncs, worm. Spybot had no clue. And HiJack shut it down. The wmnncs grabbed control of the connection going out and just flooded different ip's with stuff to the point that I literally couldn't surf the web. I wish I'd figured it out, sooner. My computer sent out a lot of junk. I don't know how it got in there, so fast, so soon after a fresh installation, but it seems to often hide in the Fonts directory, which Microsoft in its wisdom displays differently than other directories, by showing only fonts. So it's easy to hide a file there, unless you boot from another drive and use the problem drive as a second drive, where you can see all the files. There was another that got flagged, algs. Still don't know about that, but it's gone. Again, this was just in the Win2000 install.

So, I got malwarebytes and discovered in a 'full scan' not a single problem in any file in Win XP. Seemed like a good time to set a System Restore point. So I created one.

And so it goes, as I work my up in the Microsoft corporation - so it seems. They should be paying me to use their products. I should be on staff for all the research one has to do just to install apps, particularly their own.

And chkdsk. Dang it all, Microsoft. If a person don't want to run this app, give people a way to escape out of it. Period! It takes forever to run. And for all the times it was run on this ie7 botch-job, it always showed the drive was just fine. Windows falsely setting the 'dirty' flag was the problem, not the drive.

Onward and upward. I hoping for a corner office. And I'll update with my latest 'training' in updates, as it goes.