Help Help - msoobe bites

Status
Not open for further replies.
C

cinabar

After a long and very painful process, I have finally got a dual boot XP and Win98 system up and sort of running on my Dell 4600. The XP side works fine, but the Win98 side has problems. I would like to download the SPs etc for the Win98 SE OS but when I try to light up Internet Explorer I get a popup box labeled "msoobe" saying that an invalid page fault has occurred. I know that its possible for msoobe to be infected, but I've run AVG6, spybot and adaware without finding anything. I'd try Firefox as an end run but I need IE to get at the service packs and critical updates. I tried replacing msoobe.exe with a known good copy from my other system- but no joy.

I even tried a repair of msn. I get as far as the setup and then I get the same msoobe invalid page fault error. The problem :bounce: may even be unrelated to IE since it seems to occur in this other context.

Help help help - any would be greatly appreciated.
 
Welcome to TechSpot
The msoobe is for registering XP, not for W98.
Can you tell us HOW you installed W98 and XP and on which drive/partition?
 
Yes realblackstuff, I've heard that, but I have another Win98 SE on another machine and it has an Oobe directory hanging off the WINDOWS\SYSTEM hierarchy. The msoobe.exe app is in the root Oobe directory. I don't understand what it is doing there if it is peculiar to XP. By the way, the host machine has never been near XP.

As for my other machine - the Dell 4600, I installed Win98 SE first in a FAT32 partition and the XP in an NFS partition. For reasons I won't bore you with, I had to reinstall Win 98SE. I left the XP system in place when I did this. I needed to fix the boot record to get back the dual boot, but everything except the msoobe thing works just fine. I don't know what msoobe has to do with the Win98SE side of things, but I can't get on the net with the machine to get any SPs or critical updates. Also, msoobe seems to rear its ugly head in other contexts. At one point I thought the problem might be a mangled MSN. So, I followed directions for a fix on the ms support site. It had me run Rstormsn.exe and do some other stuff. Part way through the restoration, I got the msoobe invalid page fault message. As far as I know, IE4 was not involved.

I have heard that msoobe can be infected, but my AVG7, Spybot, etc. give it a clean bill of health. Even so, I replaced it with a copy from my other Win98SE machine. No joy though.

Thanks for responding - and any help would be appreciated.

realblackstuff;some additional, but perhaps irrelevant information. I believe that the msoobe problem was present after the original install of Win98SE - that is before I did a reinstall and had to fix the boot record. So I don't think the non-optimal order of installing the two OSs is a factor. Also, each partition is approximately 20GB.

realblackstuff; sorry, didn't fully answer your original question. Both systems are on the same HD. Win98SE is C: and XP is D:
 
Using your XP, you can still go to MS and get W98-updates, just a bit more involved.
Look at the corporate options.
Also, MS brought out a CD recently with ALL updates for W98/W98SE. Get hold of one of those.
I'll have to check on my daughter's PC with W98SE for that msoobe stuff. Later...
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back