On 7 Nov 2002, at 15:21, Ms Susan J Nicholson wrote:

> I have just Formatted my computer and loaded the OS (WIN '98) back onto
> it. It won't start in "Normal Mode", it says: "Fatal Exception occurred at
> 0028:C005177E in VXD VPICD(01)+00001EA2. When I press CTRL-ALT-DEL it
> re-starts, but does the same thing. Goes through the whole start-up
> process and then won't show the desktop, just a pale blue blank screen
> (not that the colour matters!). If I press "any key to continue" it goes
> straight to the pale bleu blank screen. However, it will start and do
> everything right when I start it in safe mode. Can anybody help with this
> problem please. By the way, when it does it's "scan disk" at the start, it
> doesn't find anything wrong. Thanks, Sue.

  VPICD is the low-level driver for the Programmable Interrupt Controller,
which maps "I need some attention here" signals from peripheral devices to
the device-specific code that knows what to do.

  One of the low-level changes in the Windows world in recent years has been
away from assigning separate IRQs (interrupt identifiers) to each device,
toward having most devices share a handful of identifiers and leaving it to
software (VPICD, perhaps?) to sort out which device needs to be handled by
which routine.

  My hunch is that your machine may require some patch or driver update to
support the specific hardware on your motherboard -- which your system
probably had before the format, but which is not included on your old Win98
install CD.  A likely candidate might be something like the VIA "4-in-1"
patch for systems whose motherboards use a chipset made by VIA....

David Gillett

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