VSHINIT - referenced upon startup but not in system files!

Here's a little mystery.

My laptop, running Win98se, is asking for VSHINIT.VXD upon startup and not finding it. I have to hit enter to continue. It says "the registry or system.ini cannot find this file ".

OK. Simple enough. I know the VSHINIT file was from an old McAfee install and I know it's not there. The biggest problem is that scanning the registry with regedit and looking in ALL my .ini files shows no reference to any VSH strings in them at all! That's the confusing part - if not in the registry, .ini files or other system files (e.g. autoexec.bat), where is the reference?

A little background:

A couple weeks ago this laptop had a crash and the system files had to be restored from a backup copy. Apparently this backup was a couple years old from when McAfee was still installed. I don't know what software created this system backup and why it was created 2 years ago. Anyway - with some reinstallation of software and windows update, I soon was running again except for the VSHINIT reference.

Any thoughts?

 

I find it amazing that you couldnt find any references in the registry or in the files win.ini and system.ini.

Anyway best way to remove programs that havent uninstalled properly is to re-install them and remove them again. Try that if you can get a copy of old McAfee. Maybe installing a new version of McAfee will fix it too.

 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\VMM32Files ??
regards
PS regedit will not search/report all keys in the reg

 

The other places to look are:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD

and

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Shared DLLs

 

Thanks Tony T,
Autoruns now has a place on my PC.
Let's hope it helps out stelliger with his problem ...
regards
Later edited ... put Tony T link to Sysinternals on my web page ..
sure it will be useful to other 98 users.

 

Thanks for all this advice!

It turns out I found a simple little STUPID facet of my registry search! Apparently for whatever reason, due to the last search I had done before this backup occurred, the "search for whole string" box was checked. I was only trying partial strings! Silly me!

Anyway - I found it and removed it. I'm still glad for these other tips, however.

Question - does anyone know what created the backup? Is this a feature of Win98? And why was the backup only done 2 years ago?

 

What program/software did you use to restore the "System Backup "?

 

That's the point... I didn't use ANY. It's just after the crash, on reboot it said "your system files are missing or corrupted, they are being restored from a recent backup copy ". But ironically they weren't so "recent "... and I don't recall making any backups then

 

Go to Start\Run and type in Msconfig. Click on the Startup tab, and look for a ScanRegistry entry with "c:\windows\scanreg.exe /autorun" on the same line. If not there, this is why the registry backup was so old.