I'm fed up with win98 on my home box. I went to a lot of trouble to get it working with the new motherboard. But after all that work, it's still not as smooth and trouble-free as Win2k. So now I'm dual-booting 98 and 2K for a while until I feel confident I've moved everything over properly.

Side discussion: The last straw was that I kept getting a Page Fault in DDHELP when playing Dungeon Siege, and I was hoping Win2K would cure it. It didn't. Still, the benefits of 2K are worth it...

Anyway. Among the things I want to move over, is my carefully crafted desktop "Appearance" scheme from Windows 98. Every color, size, and font in that scheme has been hand-tweaked and evolved over a number of years, starting way back in the days of Win 95.

There is a binary registry entry that represents this "Appearance". When I export that entry from 98 and import it into Win2k, Win2K displays the entry's name but refuses to actually switch to it.

The reason it refuses to switch to it is because it's in a completely different data format. In fact, the first byte indicates the data format (04 on Win98, 02 on Win2k). If I change the byte to an 02, Win2k will switch to it, but everything is completely screwed up because all the bytes are wrong.

I have checked google and annoyances.org, haven't found a solution yet. Anyone here know how to migrate that stuff from Win98 to Win2k without using pen and paper?

Aren't there bundles of registry keys to set the appearance? maybe you could export those?

pen and paper is very reliable.

Go and read Tony's post again. He has found the registry entry that stores the appearance, but it is a binary data value whose format differs between the two OSes.