Win 98 Explorer illegal operation on start-up

Hi everyone
I have just installed Win 98 on a second drive in my pc, I downloaded and installed all the updates, no problem, I installed and connected to AOL, no problem, then I downloaded and installed drivers for my Nvdia graphics card, worked fine twice then when I went to start up my pc again it gets past the logo screen to that greenie blue colour screen and then tells me that Explorer has caused an illegal operation. Invalid page fault in module EXPLORER.EXE at 015f:00401f31.
The cusor move around the screen ok but thats it.
I't wont even let me start up in safe mode.
If any one can help, thanks so much.

slipandpitch (Richard)

 

Have you tried restoring a registry copy saved before the problem? If not, restart the PC and keep pressing the F8 key during the startup, you should get a menu with a couple of options. Take the option for "Command Prompt Only" and at a command prompt type in

scanreg /restore

Then use the up/down arrow keys to highlight a registry copy with a date prior to the problem and press enter to restore it.

Let us know what happens.

 

That makes 2 of us. Yesterday I went to help a friend who has the exact same problem on a Compaq Presario computer running Win 98. He receives the same error message with the identical address. I'm not sure what he did to the computer prior to this - he's somewhat of a newbie.

I spent several hours with 'tech support' in India trying to resolve the problem. First I ran scanreg /restore with no results. Then I reinstalled Windows 98 from the .cab files. No change in the error. Tech Support claimed that the explorer.exe file is not overwritten on a reinstall, so I extracted it from the .cab files and overwrote it. No change.

Since every failure occured at the exact same memory address, tech support suggested reseating and swapping the memory chips. I tried all combinations of chip and slot positions and always get the same failure at the same address.

I'm hoping that there is some way of fixing this without resorting to the dreaded RECOVERY disk.

 

Not positive but this is worth taking a look at,

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=219269

Good Luck