Good day to all. I just received my PICkit 1 and attempted to install it on my Win 98SE laptop. I ran into some serious problems but was able to resolve them - the purpose of this message is go give others a "heads-up" about this. Re-booted laptop to ensure clean install. Inserted CD into drive, HTML welcome screen came up. I selected "Install PICkit" and allowed the installation to proceed. When finished, the install routine informed me that it needed to restart Windows. Upon re-starting, boot sequence proceeded normally right up to the point where the Windows welcome sound was played. Then, instead of showing me the desktop, I was presented with a "Explorer caused (can't remember which fault). Pressing the "Details" button showed the usual stack info. Pressing "OK" dismissed the dialog but the screen showed only the background color. Explorer did not come up. Using the 3 finger salute to bring up the windows task manager showed that the only running app was HIDSERV. Nothing else. Terminating HIDSERV did nothing. Re-booted several time - same thing. Went into safe mode - same thing, except that HIDSERV was not present in the task manager (as expected). Booted into command line mode with no problems. Went into the PICkit 1 directory, examined the install log. Noticed that many files had been overwritten. Hmm - no backup of the originals. Me being the usual paranoid person I am, I had a complete image of my drive that was less than 2 weeks old. I restored the C partition and was back up and running in less than half an hour. I had backed up the PICkit 1 install log to a different partition and now took a close look at it. I noticed that all the overwritten files were in the \windows\system directory. OK: went to that directory, reset the archive bit on every file and also copied all files to a child directory. Now I can see what changes. Then I attempted the PICkit 1 installation again. Hey - why not? I have a good restore mechanism. Same thing as before - get just to the point where the desktop is about to be displayed, then that fatal fault with Explorer. Rebooted into command line mode. Compared the contents of the \windows\system directory with the backup copy I had just made. 7 files different. Selected only those 7 files and copied both the originals as well as the over-written versions to 2 separate directories. 4 of the 7 files compared byte for byte with the originals. I ignored those. That left the following files: asycfilt.dll (same size but different contents) hid.dll (old 36864, new 18192) shlwapi.dll (old 282896, new 395264) Took an educated guess - copied the original version of shlwapi.dll back to the \windows\system directory and rebooted. System started just fine and appears to be working normally. Original version of shlwapi.dll 282896 bytes 1-18-02 version installed from PICkit1 395264 bytes 8-29-02 Not sure what else I can offer, other than to suggest that others installing PICkit 1 on a Win 98SE machine may wish to back up the 3 files I mentioned above. dwayne -- Dwayne Reid Trinity Electronics Systems Ltd Edmonton, AB, CANADA (780) 489-3199 voice (780) 487-6397 fax Celebrating 19 years of Engineering Innovation (1984 - 2003) .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .- `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' Do NOT send unsolicited commercial email to this email address. This message neither grants consent to receive unsolicited commercial email nor is intended to solicit commercial email. -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.