After installing Win98SE upgrade, sysinfo still displays old version

Old computer was running Win98 (first edition) just fine.
Wanted to upgrade in order to install AOL Parental Controls for the web to keep my son from IM'ing late into the night!
Not enough disk space to install XP.

I've installed Win98SE 4 times, but computer still thinks it's running old version Win98! Anybody know what controls this?

History follows; sorry for the long post, but I want to provide all information:

First mistake: tried upgrading from Win98SE full install disk; failed.
Got 98SE Upgrade disk; also failed.
Found help on MS KB, renamed setup files, ran Win98\setup.exe from upgrade disk.

Install ran without incident, but on reboot got many error messages about files that were "older version installed by a recent program you ran."
First error is about ddeml.dll. Others follow, didn't write them all down.

Re-installed from SE Upgrade disk twice more, same result.
Went on KB again, learned about SFC, tried to run it, but system hung up when I did Start>Run!

Finally tried booting from Win98SE full install CD and overwrote whole operating system. Still got errors on reboot.

Ran SFC, got interrupted, cancelled. Now no more errors on reboot, but system hangs up at random moments. And system info still displays Win 98, not SE.

And of course, AOL parental controls won't install!
Serves me right for even trying. But I'm not ready to give up yet. Can anybody help???

 

He's probably installed an anti Parental Controls program!
BTW, welcome to the BBS

Young boys will go everywhere on the net if they can and there are lots of traps that can be fallen into.

I suppose you have safeguards like antivirus, antispyware, etc, but some do not pick up all junk programs. I gave my old computer to a good friend for his son. After many months he said it had problems and I told him I would look at it. It had a "shopping" program installed and was only picked up by one of two antispyware, because it can be legitimately used for online shopping, BUT it was junk and had spyware installed.
I cleaned the machine up and got it running well again and left him a note about antispyware and avoiding the junk. Not long later I heard he had gone to a new computer with Win XP. Why? He wanted to play a free game and the only way to run it was to install this ghastly "shopping" program He had gone straight back to crippling his computer.

I think there might be some dubious programs on that machine.

Backup, boot to the upgrade disk, format and do a clean install (Edit:, be sure to run the chipset drivers , graphics driver installation programs, Updates, etc, soon after). If the registry is crippled you may have no other avenue

Matt

 

Win 98 upgrade

A question.
How are you judging that the upgrade did not take?
Is it that it stopped part way ?
Or are you looking at your about screen ?
Sometimes if part of Windows 98 is missing no matter what it will not reinstall properly.
I have had this a number of times with non internet gamers whose friends tell them to remove microsoft explorer in order to save space and improve speed.
No matter what on reinstall Windows will not fill in the gap.
If possible if there is very little on the hard drive other than your favorites best to save the favorites ( its a sub folder in the windows directory ) and then to format the drive and reinstall from scratch,.
This of course if there is nothing really on the drive important.
You may have to hunt for some drivers especially your network card driver after install.
Just find save those drivers before install.

 

Thank you both for the suggestions.

Luckily I am pretty sure nobody installed any pernicious programs on the machine. My son is pretty well-trained about not downloading stuff, and he's also very non-technical. Just likes to IM, and likes his computer to run without incident.

We have Zone Alarm, Norton Anti-Virus, Spybot, and Ad-Aware on that computer too. It was mine until recently, and ran Windows 98 apparently fine. The upgrade ******* it up. But I will re-run all scans, just to make sure. How did you find the shopping program, BTW, if the scans didn't flag it?

Visionof, you are right. The "About Windows" screen just says Windows 98, copyright 1998. But the My Computer > Properties does say Second Edition (finally, now).

Now the main problem I have is I can't get rid of the "ddeml.dll is older version" error message on bootup. I've restored it countless times now with sfc to no avail. And I even followed Microsoft's "Method 2" instructions, deleting the line from the system check section of the registry.

That caused BSOD and failure to boot, and I had to reinstall the operating system all over again.

I don't want to reformat the hard drive and start from scratch because there's a lot of my old stuff on that computer that I would like to keep handy. I suppose I could back it up CD's and then dig up all my old installation disks... but you know how that is. By the time I do that, we'll have a new computer running Vista.

 

It sounds like you have given him some good guidelines

You have Spybot and Adaware which are what I use, but I don't let them run in the background, just on a regular basis or if I seem to see any reason to run a scan.
The shopping program was identified by one and not the other, I only had to Adaware installed to begin with. Spybot made an alert for the spyware part of the program, but it also had "connect to the server" features. It had no uninstall of course and was quite complicated to remove.

Ddeml.dll seems to be a basic file of Windows from what I could find out. You have used SFC to extract it again so I would consider one or two things. Hardware, it may just be possible that there is a bad sector on the HDD where that file is located so run Scandisk on the drive, set to Thorough. Scandisk runs best in Safe Mode.
It may not be a problem with the file itself, but the program that is trying to access it. The problem is involved with AOL so I might look at uninstalling and reinstalling AOL (although from past experience I am not a big fan of AOL). Check for an upgrade for the AOL program and keep add-ons and startup items to a minimum. Check the information, be sure all of it is compatable with 98SE.

Did you run the reinstall outside of Windows? These sorts of problems can occur if you try to run a reinstall by putting in the Windows CD while Windows is running. You should boot to a startup floppy (or a 98 disk from www.bootdisk.com) or boot straight to the CD. Run Setup in a DOS enviroment. One of our members (BillyBob) also suggests to shut down the computer completely before booting to a boot disk, not just restart the machine, there could be a possiblity that the RAM is not cleared. (Looking back, you may have carried out most of these steps, but note the last sentence)

You can get a program called Process View. It lists all the files in use by a program. You could try running it on your XP system if it has similar programs installed and it may list what is using that file. I expect that whichever program wants to use ddeml.dll runs at startup, so do a fresh startup and look for it without opening new programs. You should find Process View at www.majorgeeks.com.

If you want to do a basic check, boot into Safe Mode. If you get the error message it will be a Windows installation problem, if not, it will be startup items in normal Windows.

Did you see this one?
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/243372/en-us
a ground roots method.

Matt

 

Thanks, guys. I gave up. Now trying to swap HD...

Thaks for all the help. I did everything as suggested (safe mode, boot from CD, scan disk, etc.) Finally admitted defeat.

Obtained another computer, same vintage, with 8gb HD already running XP.
Everything OK, except "new" computer is 331mhz and the original one is 450mhz. Thought I would just swap HD's, and use the XP disk in the faster computer.

I thought it should be simple, since there was only one HD in both computers, same HD size range, same vintage motherboard. Checked jumper for master position; plugged in cables, ran setup with auto detect drive type; got disk error. Was able to boot from cd and read C: drive fine, but it won't boot, although this was the boot disk in the other system.

Tried using manual settings for cylinders, sectors, etc., reading off the printed info on the disk. Still no good. Only difference seems to be twisted cable in original system, flat cable in other one. Tried jumper on "cable select," this also didn't work. Ran out of time before I could try swapping the cables themselves.

As far as I can tell, old DiskManager executable doesn't exist in XP. Tried booting from Win98 diskette; that didn't work either.

Questioning my sanity right now...

 

Thanks, Pete. Great help.

I booted with the WinXP disk, chose "R" for repair, and picked the windows installation (1= c:\windows) that I wanted to repair.
Then it asked me for my administrator's password! Which I didn't know, because I'm not the one who installed windows on that machine! Tried a few, all failed, I give up.
My only option at this point it seems would be to reinstall XP from scratch. Which maybe I will do. Or maybe I will just put the disk back into the original machine and call it a day.

Thank you so much for your help, though. I never would have known what the problem was.
-IK

 

Yup, tried that.

Yes.
Also contacted the person who installed XP on the disk, and he said he never uses a password. So I dunno what's going on. A support guy at Dell told me some motherboards have passwords, and you can reset them if you can find the right jumper. It seems like this is an OS password, not a motherboard password. But who knows.

Some things must remain mysterious.