Hey,

Please bear with me - this is a long post with somewhat strange problems (to me anyway).

I've spent less than half a day using Win XP, which so far, seems very frustrating.

I installed a game to C:\Program Files\Deus Ex on a friend's WinXP machine. He says it ran fine, with the cd in the
drive. We were attempting to install a small no-cd program.

For some reason there's a bubble message that appears on the desktop, which he says has been there since the game
install yesterday. I can't recall the exact wording, but the message goes something like this:

'Your files are waiting to be sent to your CD-Rom (D:\)' ...and it points to a cd icon in his tray.

The files are almost definitely some of this game's files. They appear to be in 'Documents and (?) - I forget the
second location. I did a full install, so I can't see why it might need to store anything there. My friend didn't
do anything (?) he knows about that would cause this.

Ignoring that issue, I proceeded to install the small no-cd program, which didn't work, so we decided to uninstall
the game and start over. After uninstall and a reboot the message above still appeared on the desktop, and the
files were still in 'Documents and...'
Also, a search revealed what appeared to be all of the game files still installed in C:\Program Files\Deus Ex.

Now I said I know little about XP, but this just doesn't make sense. I thought it might be a file system problem
(fat vs. ntfs) but since the game ran fine, I have my doubts. Also, the no-cd program was on a floppy that I
prepared on my fat32 WinME.
He managed to copy it to his HDD, but when he tried to open it he got an error message: 'This file is not a valid
win32 app...", which I suspect IS a (fat vs. ntfs) problem, but maybe not.

The files on the floppy were win-zipped, and I learned he doesn't have Winzip, but I expected there'd be something
that would unzip them.

So now I don't know how to proceed. Should I just delete all the known game files, then use regedit to clean up the
registry, then reinstall the game? Any thoughts on why the files were waiting to go to the cd-rom? Or why the game
files were all still in C:\program files\deus ex  folder, even after uninstall? I know that add/remove can't always
remove everything, but there's way more in that folder than a few possible shared files.

Am I correct that XP uses ntfs?
If so, the game must be compatible with both fat32 and ntfs, since it seems to run on both WinME and XP, no?

I'd really hate to let this guy down (as he's done many favors for me), especially over a (?)botched game install.
And I really don't want to use his recovery disks to wipe the drive clean, either, but I will. I just can't see
what I did wrong.

I can't think of any relevant technical info to give that would help, so - DirectX is current, OS is XP, 128MB RAM,
16MB Nvidia, plenty of HD space.

If you're still with me, sorry about the length, and thanks for your thoughts.

Al Thompson

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