Greetings listers,

I've been having a lot of fatal exception errors and general protection faults lately. Much of the time, it starts with "Explorer has caused an invalid page  fault in module GDI.EXE at 0001:00005432" or words to that effect. Since this was happening a lot, I quit having Explorer minimized while working on other things. However, it keeps happening. I've cleared everything out of my sys tray except the software for my keyboard and mouse (both Win 98 adapted, and won't work if I close down), the Volume control, and Corel Central Alarms. When I boot up, and have no software running except these, and I press Ctrl-Alt-Del, I get a box showing these programs:

OSD Main; Explorer; MS Office shortcut bar; Meplayer; Alarm [Corel central I assume]; Versato; Systray; Vsst
at; Vshwin32; Mdm; Gnetmous [this is the mouse driver]

If I click Explorer and say End Task, I get the shut down dialog box.

I've disabled View as Web Page in the Active Desktop.

This all started when I was editing instructions for using WordPerfect, and so I had Word open (the document), and WdPerf (to test the instrucs), Lotus Notes (the company e-mail), and Explorer (used earlier and minimized). Switching back and forth from Word to WdPerf caused a lot of crashes, such as
    Explorer caused an invl pg fault in module GDI.EXE at 0001:00005432 --then--NLNotes caused an inv pg f in mod [same] --then--Wpwin9 caused an inv pg f in mod User.exe at 0006:000027d8 --then--Gnetmous ...module User.exe at 0006:000016fc --then--Winword...module GDI.EXE yadda yadda then I got sick of pressing any key and powered off and let scandisk do its thing on reboot.

I haven't used WdPerf in a while now, but even with only Word
 running, and everything else shut down, I've been having page faults caused by Explorer. Why is Explorer running in the background? Why is it causing these crashes? Why when I do open it does it sometimes cause the mouse and keyboard programs to disappear from the sys tray, causing them not to work and forcing a reboot? Why can't I shut it off?

I don't know if this is related, but yesterday while working in Word's Comment feature I had a fatal exception error at 015F:BFF9DBA7. When I pressed any key, I got a window saying "Kernel 32 caused a gpf in mod KRNL386.EXE at 0001:000075a2" with the option to close or ignore. Neither worked, though, nor did Ctrl-Alt-Del, so I had to power off and reboot. I spent the rest of the day with no more than 1 program open at once. The Resource Meter has been showing plenty of free resources.

I have a H-P Vectra 500, w/ 64 Mb Ram and Win 98, ver. 4.10.1998. Not sure about the rest. The company PC Support folk
s said they could format my hard drive and reinstall everything (which they recently did anyway, to fix a font problem which was in fact caused by a corruption in the network). I said thanks but no thanks. Took me days to get all my settings back.

If anyone can shed some light on this I would be very grateful.

TIA,
ET

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