The fatal exceptions may be a result of something gone bad with the original installation of W95, and the upgrade may not be catching it. PB and HP used recovery disks that contained all necessary drivers for the original system, and just installing the upgrade may not contain all the necessary shares and drivers for your particular systen config. The same thing just happened to me when upgrading from W98 to WME. I had to reformat with the original recovery disk, then do the upgrade, and then go to the Win. Update and get all the patches. After this was accomplished, the system had absolutely no conflicts, and the machne has been functioning flawlessly since.

Keep in mind that M$ will be discontinuing on line support on the W98 updates sometiime this month, and with all the conflicting stories, and M$'s own publication, it's difficult to tell just what will be discontinued, and what will not be. In either case, the sooner you do this the better. 

Also, upon sucess of getting your system up and running, It may be advenatgeous to purchase a large USB pen drive, and a copy of Ghost, make an inage of your OS to the pen drive as a back up in anticipation of M$ not suporting 98 in the future.

Perhaps one of the other guru's would have a better solution, but I think that is what I do.

My two cents!! Good lusk

Dean Kiley...
  ----- Original Message ----- 

  Subject: Reinstalled Windows 98 will not start

  I have a Packard Bell  300 MHz Pentium II with 96 MB RAM. I was running
  Windows 98 which was an upgrade from Windows 95. It was upgraded at least 3
  years
  ago. I ran the system file checker because it was havivg a couple minor
  problems(short cuts not opening programs without rebooting, and I couldn't
  get the
  modem to connect). File checker replaced a couple corrupt files and replaced
  many others with previous versions from my Windows 98 disk. After that
  Windows
  would not boot. I tried reinstalling Windows 98 several times but it causes
  fatal exceptions when it gets to the part of setting up hardware. Sometimes
  the
  errors were as it was setting up the hardware and other times it  was when
  the
  computer needed  to restart after setting up the hardware. The following is
  one
  example of what happened.

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