Mail Archives: djgpp-workers/1998/07/20/11:16:20
Hello, Workers.
This weekend, I finally yielded to the powers that be and upgraded from
DOS6.2/Win3.1 to Win98 :-(
In looking around, there seems to be one new potential cause of trouble
with 98 that wasn't there in '95 -- at least I never heard about it. The
thing is that M$ now seems to consider the NameNumericTail registry
setting as harmful, as several installation programs (including 98's
'setup', they say) seem to be depending on the short name to be 'progra~1'
for the the 'C:\Programs' directory (C:\Programme in my German version).
Touching it with 'NameNumericTail=00' automatically seems to change this
to the (more sensible) 'program', which M$ dislikes.
They even went as far as
1) making 'setup.exe' barf (error dialog, and break out) if
NameNumericTail is found active in the Registry; and
2) providing, on the 98 CD, a tool to remove NameNumericTail without
having to call up 'regedit' (they seem to mistrust users of Win98 to get
that done correctly, and not shredder their configuration in the way). You
just right-click on 'nnt.inf' and select 'install' from the context menu,
and that's it.
Looks like at least the relevant entries in the FAQ will have to be
updated to reflect this new policy of M$, and maybe decide on a
more-or-less 'official' policy of DJGPP to put in the FAQ.
To deal with the problem itself, I propose adding to djdev202 two '.inf'
scripts that allow to add/delete the NameNumericTail without regedit, so
DJGPP users are protected from the dangers of regedit as well (I could
supply such scripts, if necessary...)
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (broeker AT physik DOT rwth-aachen DOT de)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.
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