Patches & Support files - March '98

Updates and fixes from this month's Bug Patrol Column

Rose Vines bring you the latest batch of bugs, fixes and workarounds for DOS 6.2, Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and assorted Windows applications.

Norton Utilities

Version 3 bug ridden
Much to its credit, that essential collection of Windows tools, Norton Utilities, rarely appears in our Bug Patrol column. Unfortunately, the latest version -- Norton Utilities 3.0 for Windows 95 -- is full of bugs, some of them serious.

Most of the bugs appear to be in the SpeedDisk, SpeedStart and Optimisation Wizard utilities, and in the worst cases they cause system crashes and loss of hardware settings. There are also incompatibilities with Diamond and Number 9 video cards.

Symantec is planning to release a patch addressing all the major bugs. It should be out by the end of March, so make sure you check the Symantec site for information (www.symantec.com). The best way to ensure you have the latest patches incorporated into your copy of Norton Utilities is to use the LiveUpdate feature regularly (you'll need to have a modem to use it). To update your program to the latest version, right-click the LiveUpdate sensor in System Doctor and choose Launch from the menu.

Clipboard errors
If you select Show Clipboard from the Windows Menu in Adobe Acrobat Exchange version 3.0, you may end up with the message "Could not launch clipboard". To fix this, you'll need to install Clipboard Viewer. If the Viewer is already installed (look for it on the Program Menu, Accessories, System Tools menu), you'll have to remove it and then reinstall it.

To install Clipboard Viewer, make sure you have your Windows 95 installation disk at hand and then:

1. Open the Start Menu and choose Settings, Control Panel to open the Control Panel.

2. Double-click Add/Remove Programs and click the Windows Setup tab in the Add/Remove dialogue box.

3. In the components scroll box, double-click on Accessories and select Clipboard Viewer to place a checkmark in the box beside it.

4. Click Apply and insert the Windows 95 disk when prompted.

If you need to remove the Viewer first before reinstalling, follow the steps above for installing the Viewer, but in Step 3 deselect Clipboard Viewer to remove the checkmark beside its name. Then click OK.

Self-extracting floppies
PKZip for Windows version 2.50 has a great feature: it can write spanned (larger than one disk) self-extracting files to floppies and preserve the long filenames. If the compressed, self-extracting file spans two or more disks, the compression and extraction work perfectly. However, if the compressed file happens to fit onto a single disk, the resulting self-extracting archive will be corrupt and cannot be recovered.

If you stick with version 2.50, the only remedy is to repeat the compression to a hard disk drive and then copy the result to a floppy.

It seems the new version 2.60 has fixed this problem, so we've included the shareware version on this month's PC User Offline CD-ROM.

QuickTime installation issues
IBM World Book requires the installation of Apple's QuickTime. The QuickTime installation is handled automatically during setup, but you may encounter the following error when you reach the 66% mark during QuickTime installation: "Not enough file handles".

To fix this, you'll need to jump into DOS and make a change to your config.sys file. Here's how:

1. Close down Windows 95 by clicking the Start button, choosing Shut Down and then choosing the Restart In MS-DOS Mode option in the Shut Down Windows dialogue box. Then click OK. This will close Windows and restart the computer in DOS mode.

2. At the DOS prompt (usually C:\) type CD \ and press Enter. This places you in the root folder of your hard disk drive.

3. Now type:

copy config.sys config.ibm

and press Enter. This creates a copy of your config.sys file, in case anything goes wrong.

4. At the DOS prompt, type:

Edit config.sys

And press Enter. This will load the config.sys file into an editor, allowing you to modify it.

5. Look through the config.sys file and see if there is a line beginning files=nn, where 'nn' is a number less than 60. If you find such a line, change the value to 90, so the line reads files=90. If there is no such line, add it to the file on blank line.

6. Open the File menu and choose Save to save your changes.

7. Open the File menu and choose Exit.

Now, you can restart your computer and restart the World Book installation procedure.

Unfortunately, if you ever want to uninstall the World Book, you'll find it impossible to uninstall QuickTime completely. You'll be confronted with an error message saying that one of the DLL files is in memory and cannot be removed.

Windows 3.x compressed drives
If you have Navigator for Windows 3.x, don't try installing it on a compressed drive or running it when using RAM doubling software. You're likely to encounter false memory errors or General Protection Faults if you do so.

The only workaround is to install it on an uncompressed drive, and ensure you don't use RAM doubling software while browsing with Navigator.

Faulty find and replace
The Find and Replace command in FrontPage 97 Explorer doesn't work if you select both the Match Case and Match Whole Word Only boxes. There's no workaround, but the problem doesn't exist in FrontPage 98.