Hi People! -My wife's e-mail address and her computer but my computer's problem- Yesterday I dug a hole and today I seem to just be digging deeper! I am running Win98SE. My computer, a self updated clone, has an ASUS P5AB motherboard with an AMD PII 450 MHz CPU, 128 MB PC100 SDRAM, a 6 and 2 GB HD, a 56K Win modem, 3 1/2 Floppy, 36X CD drive and a Mitsumi 4X24X4 CD-RW IDE burner. I have almost 2 GB of free space on my 6 GB C drive. A few days ago I installed Universal Translator Deluxe [UT] software to a perfectly operating system. The install was successful but during it I was advised that some files would be replaced and the "old" ones backed up in case I wanted to un install Universal Translator at a later date. The first time that I ran UT it was fine but on successive runs it quit translating and, as I tried to have it resume, it reported an illegal operation related to Kernel32.dll and shut down. Retries had the same result. I was not trying to translate a long document. I decided to un install the program and reinstall it. Several reinstalls made no difference but unlike the first install I was not asked for the program serial number. I used both the Control Panel ADD/REMOVE feature [as instructed by UT] and my Remove-IT program. Neither method has been able to locate and remove whatever is preventing UT from asking for the serial number. However several re-installations were successful. I began to suspect a bad program disk so I decided to try an installation on my wife's computer. It installed fine, asked for the serial number as expected and seems to be translating just fine. On her Win95 machine the files backed up in case of later un install are: Actcnc.exe, Cgram.exe, GLF2373.TMP, Ie-euro.exe, MFC42.dll, MFCANS32.dll, Msagent.exe, MSVCIRT.dll, and Regsvr32.exe. Presumably additional or different files would have been backed up on my machine. Since I did a final removal of UT from my machine before the Explorer.exe fault, I have no way of determining which files were backed up. As usual, I did not think that a hard copy might be helpful. At the end of all the foregoing my machine seemed to be working fine. I tried to find further UT files, hidden or otherwise, that might still be present. None were found. Then I got SMART/STUPID- your choice! I decided to run the SYSTEM FILE CHECKER after I had done a problem free Scandisk. As expected there were some problems identified. I changed the file reference where it seemed appropriate, i.e. a newer file had been loaded after WIN 98 installation. Where an older file had replaced a WIN 98 file, I reinstalled the WIN 98 ones and where a possible corrupt file was found, I reinstalled a clean one from the WIN 98 CD. The replaced files were backed up to C:\Windows\Helpdesk\SFC. Perhaps fortunately I was able to print a copy of the file list before I did the next SMART/STUPID thing. There are 85, mostly .dll files with a few .exe and .ocx files as well. I can't be certain that all of them were added during this run of SFC. On reboot to effect the changes I encountered the Explorer.exe fault. Windows loaded past the point of my log in and then this message appeared: "This program [Explorer] has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. Detail was: Explorer caused an invalid page fault in module Explorer.exe at 0167:00401831." Register, Bytes at CS:EIP, and Stack Dump alpha/numeric data follow. When I close the error message I am left with a blank desktop and when I Control-Alt-Delete there are no running programs listed and I have to C-A-D a second time to shut down. A boot into SAFE MODE encounters the same problem. I just cannot get into Windows. My friendly computer bible, O'Reilly's Windows 98 Annoyances suggested that I delete the Windows 98 swap file and the Windows temp file followed by a Scandisk. I did this. No change. I then searched the Win 98 Help File on the CD, booted from the Win 98 Startup disk. No solutions emerged. I decided to run the Windows installation program on top of the existing one. Maybe the less smartest thing to have done! It ran fine up to the two minutes left point when it was configuring my system software as part of the Updating System Settings phase. Then this message appeared: "Error or Exception occurred when calling the function""DllInstall"" in C:Windows\System\shdocvw.dll" I clicked OK and the load process appeared to continue but in reality had stopped. After an hour I rebooted and Windows indicated that it was continuing with the installation. I was instructed to reboot to complete the setup, did so and Explorer page fault had survived all my machinations. I've run out of ideas. Can anyone help? I really don't want to format the HD and reinstall WIN 98 from scratch. Thanks in advance, Peter Darrach "Hold No Punches.." Rode brings you great shareware/freeware programs with his honest opinions in this weekly column. http://nospin.com/rode