'Unknown Device" appeared after Netscape Update (4.79)

[janew]

First time using this forum. I run Win98 on a Dell XPST700r. I just upgraded Netscape Communicator to 4.79. Everything worked fine. I powered down overnight, and on rebooting in the am, got a message that windows found new unidentified hardware and it kicked off the driver installer wizard. The wizard won't let me bypass installation. If I hit ESC a few times, the system boots and everything seems to work fine.

I checked this forum and found a similar problem from 11/99, and the suggestion was to remove the things witih question marks from device manager, restart and direct the system toward sound or modem drivers. I did this, but no luck. I also tried directing the wizard to each folder where drivers might be, thinking if it found the right one it would add it and that would be that. Again, no luck.

Note, I didn't uninstall the old version of Netscape before installing the new one. Could that have caused this? I uninstalled Netscape completely and reinstalled it. No luck. How do I find out what Win98 thinks is a new device? I'm anxious to solve this and would welcome any and all suggestions.

Thank you for your time.
Janew

 

[reghakr]

janew,

One of the best things about 98, is that it keeps a backup of the registry for the past 5 days, or more with ini file editting. Re-loading the system will not fix registry errors.

Try hitting F8 on startup, choose command prompt only. At the c: prompt, type:
cd\windows\command
then type:
scanreg /restore
and choose a date prior to the problem.
========================================================
Download this utility to track your installs:

PC Magazine's InCtrl5 v1.0
InCtrl5 is the fifth incarnation of one of PC Magazine's most popular utilities. By monitoring the changes made to your system when you install new software, it enables you to troubleshoot any unexpected problems that come up. Virtually every modern program uses an install utility that installs or updates files, and also may record data in the registry, and update INI files or other essential text files. A companion uninstall utility should precisely reverse the effects of the install utility. When a newly installed program causes existing applications to fail, or when the supplied uninstall utility can't complete its task, to restore your system you need a record of exactly what the original install utility did. InCtrl5 can provide this record. This new version offers a variety of new features, including an attractive new interface, the ability to track changes to text files such as AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS, HTML reports, and command line switches. It runs under Win95 or higher, or WinNT 4 or higher. Older versions of Windows are supported by previous versions of InCtrl. If you are running Windows NT 4 or Windows 95, you will need Internet Explorer 4 or higher to preview HTML reports within the program.

Download link and help on using it is available here:

http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/stories/solutions/0,8224,2653679,00.html

reghakr