Here is the answer

Congratulations!

In reference to this post I think.

Naah, otherwise I'd have fed any new ideas back into the same thread. Maybe I was being too cryptic. If you read the article you will see that a number of problems that commonly occur in W98 installations (relating to basic system drivers, including USB) can be caused by the lack of VXDs required that are not unpacked during an install. By manually unpacking them and putting them on your system, it supposedly improves reliability.

I have done it on two machines, and got the following:

- the mouse pointer "jump" that I was getting has stopped!
- on one machine, the IDE drive is apparently running faster, with a boot time of 1:23 instead of 3:00+!! (before you jump in and say "but but he's all SCSI..." this is the one machine that isn't, and I don't care if it hiccups)
- USB downloads to the empeg seem slightly faster, but I can't be sure. It may even help with some of the USB "hangs" that people have been seeing.

I would recommend reading the article, and given it takes only 3 minutes + a reboot, then why ot try it out?

Just for the heck of it, I did the steps in the article, but I've not yet seen speed improvements anywhere.

In once case, I replaced a newer vmouse.vxd with the older one from the Win98 cab files, but otherwise those were all files that did not yet exist on the system.

The one concern I have is that it was unclear as to which files were supposed to go in system and which in in system/vmm32 so I put them all in both places.

I can tell the files are working because the parenthetical statements are gone from my driver details panels (as the article said they would).

There are no flies on you, sir. Well done!

I must admit that when I read the article, I thought "Ah no, badly researched, not enough info" but if you actually spend the time to look at all/ the drivers in the list one by one, you can see which basic drivers are required, and where they should go. I agree, after only a couple of days, there is no "massive improvement in reliability", but I am already seeing fewer "Mouse wanders", "Explorer Hangs", "Better Comms results", and above all, FASTER boot times which I very defininately will not argue with!

* Your results may vary!