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I've never done a Win98 to 2K or XP upgrade, so for kicks (after Ghosting the boot partition) I upgraded my newly built LAN party rig to Win2K.

If you upgrade from Win98 to either Win2K or WinXP, you need to uninstall Nero first (you can also uninstall it AFTER the upgrade) then re-install it when you're done. This MAY only apply to Nero installs using a virtual CD-R - not sure though (when you don't have a real CD-R, Nero installs a virtual CD-R which allows you to make ISO images).

The rig I tried this on does not presently have a CD-R installed in it.

Nero installs a background DLL and it apparently installs on of two different DLLs depending on whether it's a Win9x or NT based system. The 9x DLL is incompatible with Win2K/XP and it'll crash Explorer whenever you try to look at a drive's properties or bring up it's shares.

Uninstalling Nero before or after the upgrade solves the problem, then you can re-install Nero afterwards.

It was a LONG troubleshoot to figure this out, though.

I upgraded to Win2K & spent HOURS trying to figure out why Explorer was crashing when I brought up a drive's properties. I thought it was a bad COM+ Windows Update (it didn't update smoothly - locking up part way through). Reinstall of the update didn't help.

So I restored the Win98 Ghost image and upgraded to Win2K again - same problem.

Restored the Win98 Ghost image yet AGAIN and this time upgraded to WinXP. SAME PROBLEM!

I KNEW my 98 install was clean - I only just installed it the other day with only the bare minimum apps installed, so assumed it was some background app or an app that uses explorer extensions like Winzip that was causing the problem.

I never would have guessed it was Nero, though. I caught on whenl I went through the XP error logs and found a reference to a DLL that had the word "Nero" in the filename.


Interesting thing is that I have broadband so I allowed both Win2K and XP to download the latest compatibility data before upgrading, but neither reported a compatibility issue with Nero.

Ahhh, the wonderful world of computers, you learn something new each and every day.
This is just another reason to do a clean OS install whenever possible to avoid those pitfalls.

Troubleshooting such errors is timeconsuming and it can drive you nutz sometimes.

Oh I agree Doc. This was, after all, an experiment.

I've never seen the point of doing an upgrade from Win9x to an NT OS. There's SO MUCH that could concievably go wrong. An upgrade from 9x to ME for instance is childsplay by comparison, and even that often goes awry.

There's so much potential for mayhem. For instance, many programs use COMPLETELY DIFFERENT DLLs for a NT and 9x based OSes.

Even on this rig I had a little snafu because Intellimouse was installed (ironically an MS product and you'd think an MS OS would handle an MS product properly - or at least warn me of a problem).

I couldn't even bring up the mouse settings in control panel after the upgrade. Tried re-installing intellimouse and it failed. Tried the repair option and it said it completed, but it still didn't work (it probably restored Win9x files which were incompatible). Tried uninstalling, but when I ran the installer to re-install it, it said it was already installed.

I had to delete the folder and re-install it.

One or two other apps also had some problems.

Now this is on a CLEAN system with just a few apps installed and only a few days old so you know the registry is pretty clean.

Upgrade a 2 or 3 year old Win98 install to Win2K or XP? I wouldn't want to.

What I've done (5Xs now on 4 different PCs here) is install a fresh Win98 install, then 98PLUS, then Win2K and the ONLY reason I've done it like that is because I like 98PLUS themes and yes, the un-official Quake SS and Quake theme does run perfectly in Win2K this way . I have a Dr. Evil theme on this PC and the original Star Trek theme running on the laptop.
I have no problems whatsover doing Win2K this way and it's the same OS IMHO (stable as hell) but this way I'm still able to use, DL and add any Win98 Plus theme as Win2K normally has no themes otherwise.
I'd totally agree with you that I'd never upgrade an older (probably "bugged out") Win98 install as Win98 definately seems to degrade and get buggy in time due to various known causes. If anyone wants to try it my way, definately format and start with fresh Win98 install first.
I havent tryed/used Nero in years so that, nor any other programs gave me any problems.