Date: Mon, 20 Jul 1998 17:14:55 +0200 (MET DST) From: Hans-Bernhard Broeker To: djgpp workers list Subject: Potential gotcha: Win98 vs. NameNumericTail Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Precedence: bulk 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.