I've recently installed Virtual PC 2007 on my computer and have been having a blast reliving the glory days. WFWG 3.11 was fairly easy to get going, I got the proper video/sound/network drivers installed, along with the Virtual Machine Additions, TCP/IP stack and put the Calmira II shell over it. The only trouble I've run into is with both Netscape Navigator 4.08 and IE5, which are the only two browsers I've tried installing. Upon loading, both give me "General Protection Fault" errors and crash, usually related to "KRNL386.EXE". Once, WFWG itself gave me this error upon booting up. I'm stumped, does anyone have any suggestions? I'm using this with a Linksys USB wireless adapter for the real network interface, and though I've read USB devices don't work at all under VPC, I have no problems using this in other applications under 3.11 or under my VPC install of Windows 95. Thanks in advance! -sean

USB devices don't work directly on VPC, meaning your VM can't see the USB device itself (as oposed to parallel and serial devices, to which VPC can comunicate directly), but there is no problem in using a wireless adapter through USB, as VPC uses the Windows' network interface, not the device directly. Also, how much RAM does your VM have? if it is more than 48, try reducing it to, hmn... 16 or 32. If it is the other way arround... try going to 64... I never had this issue in VPC with Windows 3.11 so I don't know what could be causing it.

Ah, it all makes sense now...unfortunately, increasing/decreasing the RAM size didn't help any. I had it at 64MB initially, tried several different intervals between that and 8MB but no dice. Opera 3.62 works somewhat, though certain pages will also cause it to crash with a "General Protection Fault". I'll get to the bottom of this eventually. All other software I've thrown at it works flawlessly, very strange that it only appears to be a problem with the browsers.

Have you tried using the standard VGA adapter?

Thanks to my career choices throughout the years I've had the pleasure of installing WFW311 on many a machine in my life. Strangely enough, I can't say I've ever had as much trouble doing it as I have under Virtual PC. I couldn't count how many hours I've spent trying to figure out why 3.11 is so unhappy running on it, but I can tell you what I've learned so far. IE5 doesn't like any of the video modes you use with the S3 drivers for VPC, so you're best off just using some standard VGA or SVGA mode (has something to do with its rendering images). WFWG doesn't like EMM386 running while it's running under VPC, either. Use DOS 6.0 instead of 6.22 or 5.x. Make sure you have the latest TCP/IP package from Microsoft (not Trumpet). Go into the BIOS setup for VPC (hit DEL right after starting your VM) and disable "ACPI aware OS" and anything relating to power management. I suppose the last pointer would be to use VMWare instead of VPC for 3.11, or IE4 if you truly need VPC for some reason. Hope this helps.

Thanks a lot, all very good suggestions but unfortunately none of em worked out...I haven't tried MS-DOS 6.0 yet because I don't have a copy but I'll try to track one down, do a fresh install and see if that helps any. Very strange behavior, other people have no problems with it..maybe it's something with the host machine. I'll try it on a different computer and report back.. WFWG 3.11 is very stable under VMWare 6, takes everything I throw at it...but being limited to 16 color VGA stinks. I also like the UI and simplicity of VPC a little better. I don't know my way around VMWare as well! Thanks again, your help is much appreciated!

OK! After a few hours of messing around, I've finally found a way of getting IE5 working somewhat reliably under Virtual PC and XP Home. These are the EXACT steps I took, I'm not saying it's the only way but it's the only way I could get it to work... 1) If you're using VPC 2007 you're going to need either VPC 2004 or the DOS Virtual Machine Additions for 2k4, which will work under 2k7. I opted to try 2k4 after repeated attempts with 2k7. It can be downloaded here: http://www.oldversion.com/program.p... 2) If you've already got a working WFWG install with a non-functioning IE5, you need to start from scratch. I did at least, I'm guessing when IE5 drops errors it does something to the WFWG registry that permanently screws it up. 3) Create a new virtual machine with 32MB RAM and a 500MB hard disk. These parameters are flexible, but again it's what worked for me. Install MS-DOS 6.22, followed by VPC 2004's DOS Virtual Machine Additions (the disk image of which can be found in Program Files>Microsoft Virtual PC 2004>Virtual Machine Additions) 4) Begin installation of WFWG 3.11. I installed every driver I could through the installation program, this seems to work better than using defaults and adding them later. The first driver to install is the S3 Trio Video Driver. Using the one found here: http://drivers.s3graphics.com/en/do... I have absolutely no problems at 800x600 with 16.7 million colors. Drivers I had found elsewhere caused problems for me. 5) Continue the installation as normal. The next important prompt is the Network Setup. If you want to share files/printers with other computers on your network, check "Install Microsoft Network", then "Advanced" on the right side which will bring up another set of options below. 6) Now you want to install the driver for the virtual network adapter, which can be found here: http://developer.intel.com/design/n... Then click "Add Protocol" and install the Windows TCP/IP stack which can be found here: http://download.microsoft.com/downl... 7) Double click the TCP/IP protocol in the menu box. Select "Use DHCP", then drop out to your host machine, select START->RUN->COMMAND and type IPCONFIG /ALL at the DOS prompt. Enter whatever is listed as the Default Gateway into your WFWG setup, then click "DNS" and enter that corresponding info and make up a host name. It can be anything. Type exit in your host machine's DOS prompt and get back to WFWG. 8) Continue the installation, you'll be prompted to enter a name for the computer and you can change the "WORKGROUP" name to whatever your network uses. Mine uses "MSHOME" as I think most XP based home networks do... 9) At this point the WFWG installation should be nearing completion. Finish up, reboot and copy this version of IE5 to your virtual hard disk: http://oldfiles.org.uk/lightspeed/i... *NOTE: This exact version is the only one that worked for me, though others may work for you. You'll also need WinZip to decompress the file: http://oldfiles.org.uk/lightspeed/w... 10) Begin the IE5 installation. VERY IMPORTANT: Select "STANDARD INSTALLATION" instead of "FULL INSTALL" unless you want to repeat every step up until this point. Afterwards, IE5 will prompt you to reboot. At this point, it hung during the reboot or maybe I wasn't patient enough...but CTRL-ALT-DELETING or even closing the VM and restarting didn't effect anything so it shouldn't for you. 11) Restart Windows, the IE5 installation will proceed automatically when it loads. Enter your time zone and it's done! At this point, you should go to MAIN->CONTROL PANEL->INTERNET and change the IE homepage, as the default may make it crash. 12) Start IE and enjoy outdated 16-bit web browsing rife with javascript errors and poorly rendered HTML over your modern broadband connection. Some websites display perfectly, others are terrible. You may still encounter the dreaded "General Protection Fault" error on a very rare occasion, however this will not eternally EFF your VM up and force you to re-install everything. Just shut down IE and restart and it's all good! Next project: Netscape 4.08 I got a lot of this info from the "Virtual PC Guy Weblog" located here: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_gu...