Conference noted::windows95

    
    Re: office upgrade
    
    Right. The office upgrade installation procedure will prompt you for a
    qualifying product's setup disk.
    
    
    Tom
    ---
    Dictated using DragonDictate.
    

Curious thing - I had an "Office 97 Preview" installed on my system - I 
purchased the Upgrade edition and before installing it, removed the Preview
edition.  The upgrade put up a message saying that it "failed" to find a
qualifying product on the disk, said "Please wait", and after it rummaged some
more, proceeded with the installation and didn't prompt me for an older
product disk (which I was ready to provide.)  I guessed that it may have found
some "trace" of the older installation, but was a bit puzzled by the
whole thing.

					Steve

    I've seen this behaviour with at least one other MS product (MS Project).
    In that case I succesfully installed the "upgrade" kit on a PC that had
    never had Project installed, despite various messages and warnings
    which suggested that failure was imminent unless I could point SETUP to a
    prior installation. (This was a legally legitimate exercise btw.)
    
    Antony.

My registry became corrupted as a result of a virus which has now 
been removed.  I still get an error message when booting Win95 that
basically says there's a registry problem, reboot to reinitialize the
registry.  No amount of rebooting fixes the problem.

If I reinstall Win95, are new registry and initialization files created?
Do the existing "corrupt" registry files get deleted?

Any other suggestions or gotchas I should be aware of?

BTW... I found the following info in a Win95 tips & tricks file.  Will
this method work?


	If you want to create a new registry without a total 
	reinstall, type  setup /Pf  at the C: prompt.  This will 
	create a new registry from scratch.  Please note the case 
	of the letters, capitol P, and small case f.


Thanks,

Joe

    You could just try running SETUP from the WIN95 CDROM. It will do a
    complete re-install, preserving most of the application pointers and
    icons and desktop setup as possible.
    
    I have done it many times and it works fine to fix corrupt files, fix
    registry, etc.
    
    mark

    Though if there is a corrupt .INF file buried in the INF subdirectory,
    W95 blindly recreates a corrupt registry... The only solution to that
    is to find the offending .INF file and delete it. That's not usually
    easy to find.
    
    Chris
    

How does one determine if an .INF file has become corrputed?

The virus my PC contracted ("Ripper") is a stealth virus that springs to
life every 1000 or so disk writes.  When active, it will scramble data in
the write cache before writing to disk.  I am making an assumption that
one of the registry files (SYSTEM.DAT or USER.DAT...are there more?) got
clobered while it was being updated.  

Does Win95 do writes to .INF files?

If the problem persists after reinstalling Win95 as previously suggested,
will reinstallation of W95 replace any .INF file if I delete the INF
files?

thx again. - joe

    It's hard to tell without some research... 
    
    A .INF associated with an application is usually OK.
    
    The key .INF files are the ones that W95 generates to hold some of its
    config data  - and it regenerates the Registry from that info. It does
    not always recheck the config, if it has a .INF file... so the
    reinstall gens a new, corrupt registry. 
    
    Fun, eh?
    
    Look for .INF's with the same date/time as your last reinstall - these
    are probably the ones you need. They will probably be recognizable by
    name as W95 files....
    
    To really go into this, you need both the W95 resource kit, and the W95
    Secrets book. It's scattered thru both of those references.
    
    Note that if you delete all the .INF's, you are likely to lose a lot of
    things, and many programs may not run.
    
    Chris
     

    
    I get complaints now and then in the Inf directory from Norton
    Antivirus, specifically two files, drvidx.bin and drvdata.bin or
    something along those lines. This usually happens when I try to run a
    setup.exe program for installing something and I get the black screen
    with blue window from Norton Antivirus asking me what I want to do. It
    tells me it's an unknown virus (with setup.exe), I usually continue
    at that point and then run NAV again afterwoulds. Never seen a virus
    yet (so far)...
    
    How can I tell what files in this directory I can delete? I have a
    bunch in there, but not sure what this directory was even for (I
    assumed for older W31 based programs, ie shareware stuff, etc...).
    
    And/all info is appreciated.
    
    

It looks to be a directory actively used by Windows 95 for keeping information
about devices.  It's on my laptop which has never had Win 3.x installed.

The "unknown virus" warning can come out if NAV detects an executable file
which changes size.  This happens only if you have "unknown virus detection"
enabled, which is not the default.  If you get this warning about a file
that you are downloading or that is being expanded during an installation,
it's probably ok to ignore it.  You should worry if you get a warning about
a specific, named virus, or if the "unknown virus" warning occurs when you
are doing something unrelated.

				Steve