Now another one... a DELL 386. It has an old Seagate drive, 85MB, with DOS 6.20 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11. This drive was in a 486, but the 486 got scrapped and I have now fitted the same drive into the Dell, which has on-board video. I had Calmira XP on the drive too but I removed it as it looked awful with the 16 colours available on the Dell. However, now when I boot into Windows, the desktop background appears with the movable hour-glass, but when the Program Manager is supposed to appear the desktop disappears, to leave nothing on the screen but an upper-case "E" and a cursor. No keyboard input is recognised after this, not even Ctrl+Alt+Del... The only way to get back to a DOS prompt is to switch off and back on again. I have tried reinstalling Windows off my own 3.11 discs (without deleting the old installation), but it hasn't improved it. What is the mysterious letter E telling me? I have edited my Autoexec.bat and Config.sys files to remove references to anything that is no longer there. If the problem is in the Windows registry, is there any way to edit the registry from DOS? If I have to delete Windows and reinstall, will I have to reinstall all the Windows software (ie MS Office, Corel Draw, etc.)? Or could I save the old WIN.INI file and reuse that in a new installation? It seems unlikely that the problem was due to the video adapter, as I get a few seconds of desktop background. I have hunted through the Windows directory for any files that Calmira might have altered, but I don't know which files to check. WIN.INI has no reference to Calmira. (Don't worry, Calmira fans, I have Calmira working on a Pentium system and I am very pleased with it!) Tommy.

Hi, No harm will happen if you take registry file out of commission by changing its' name. You may rename registry file (reg.dat) at DOS prompt. Change to windows directory first. Type something like this: REN REG.DAT REG.DA- Win3.x will create a new small file named reg.dat when Windows is restarted. If your problem still is present, I would recommend deleting small reg.dat and renaming your old filename back to reg.dat. Are you sure you have VGA 16 color driver loaded? At DOS prompt in Windows directory, type: SETUP Then be sure you have proper driver selected. Don't wipe out Windows until some other things have been tried first because saving the win.ini file (with so many changes not matching up to a fresh install) will give you errors most likely. Good luck. JD

Read your post again. If you installed again, then the VGA setting is probably correct and SHELL=C:\WINDOWS\PROGMAN.exe (in SYSTEM.INI) will be right. Maybe a DELL user can help you out...

Hi JW, yes you were right about the line in SYSTEM.INI... I've never opened that file before, but that was where the error was. Windows 3.11 is now running perfec... well, as well as it ever can! Thanks again. Tommy.