malevolent popups

i recently clicked on a popup from the langa newsletter 10-28 users links "cool and fun sites"...optical illusions(page 2) where the pop up asked my opinion about prez bush(this was before the elections); anyway i clicked on it to indicate negative and another window popped up to congratulate me on winning some prize which i ignored. shortly after that my computer crashed. the FAT was beyond repair; scandisk could not fix it. i could only salvage files thru DOS; the main drive became so quirky that it would not let me see it as a slave except thru DOS....

anyway, my question is: can popups contain code that will screw up the FAT?

 

ON Windows 9X systems, FAT is vulnerable to corruption when the system crashes or hangs while there are open files that have not been properly closed by the apps that opened them. Obviously when the system crashes, all apps are suddenly terminated and, barring some intervening app such as Norton CrashGuard to intercept the crash, there is no way to properly close those open files or gracefully terminate the running applications. I don't think it was this particular popup that did it {although of course you would want to avoid that popup and not repeat the disaster}; but rather that 9X kernel systems are less stable than NT kernel systems, and the FAT filesystem is vulnerable. Upgrading to NT kernel {Windows 2K or XP} and NTFS filesystem is the best path to more stability but if you can't do this on that box, make regular backups of your files and registry, and just try to be careful I guess. Some folks have run 98 for years without any major file corruption or disaster like what you have experienced here. My condolence and hope you don't have to experience that again.