A Win98SE shutdown problem solved

About three weeks ago I suddenly started getting an intermittent problem with shutting down Windows 98SE: it would go to a black screen with the PC still running. Forcing the power off caused an obligatory Scandisk on next boot.

I already had the Microsoft patch Q273017 which adds a delay at shutdown to resolve such problems, and I installed it again for good measure, but this made no difference.

There are existing threads here concerning Win98 shutdown problems, e.g.:
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=71665
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=75011
but I couldn't find any with precisely the symptoms I saw.

Next I tried setting AMON to not scan the floppy drive on shutdown; this also made no difference. What did work was this, which I found in the Help for AMON:

"On certain Windows 95/98 you may experience a problem with shutdown. If installing the appropriate patch for Windows 98 SE provided by Microsoft does not make any difference, you may try enabling the Load resident protection dynamically option..." [now called "Load file system monitor dynamically"].

I haven't seen the shutdown problem for 2 weeks, so I guess it's fixed. Thank you to Eset for some genuinely helpful Help, and I hope this may help someone else as well. Just out of curiosity: was an updated NOD32 program component released around September 29, because if so, it might have triggered the problem.

For the record, I also run ZoneAlarm Free version 5.5.062.000; from previous experience an interaction with NOD32 to cause the original problem cannot be ruled out.

Richard

 

Thanks Richard for letting us know, as documenting the solution in the manner you have may help someone in the future...

Cheers