Hello, I have a major problem and am desperate. Perhaps someone here can help me, because so far, no on else has been able to. About 2 months ago, I was sending an email, and immediately after hitting send, I tried to minimize my email window. Up popped a completely blue screen with a message that, in part, said i had "A fatal exception error" in a "VXD" file. I have since learned that this error indicates some kind of corruption somewhere deep in the bowels of my OS, at least that's the english version of the explanation I got. :) I use Windows 95 (I know, it's old) and Netscape Messenger for my email. My specs are: PII Celeron 333mHz, 64 megs RAM, 2.2 gig HD, 56k modem, 17" mon. Now, virtually everytime I try to send email, my computer crashes in this way, giving me the same error. Sometimes the message gets sent, sometimes not. It also happens when I receive mail, and sometimes when I click on a link to another site. Although I can still use other programs on my computer, occasionally they freeze up, where they never used to. Or maybe I am just noticing it more now. At any rate, tis error message only occurs within Netscape and Netscape Messenger. I was told to upgrade from Netscape 4.61, which I was using, to 4.78, a stable version but newer. I did this, without improvement. I have been told to buy a new machine, but this is not possible for me right now. I have also been told to upgrade my OS at least to 98. I would be willing to do this, but have one major problem. When I upgraded from 3.1 to 95, I was unable to access old emails. The person who installed 95 even tried to save my old emails at the time, but at times I cannot access them, and at best they all come up in one huge block, and I have to try to read throught them all to find what I want. My question is: Does anyone know how to load a new OS without losing my old email? Any help would be greatly appreciated. I am a pretty low-tech computer user, but would be unable to continue my research without it. I hope I am able to receive your responses, and respond to them... :):):) Thank you, Jeff

yes, you can upgrade for windows 95 to windows 98 without losing any data stored on the hard disk. Doing this could help resolve some of your os problems, I would recommend you do this especially since upgrading your version of netscape was unsuccessful at resolving your problem.

VXD's are virtual device drivers that the software uses to communicate with the hardware. If you mail is still on the server, not located on the machine, then its safe. I would follow scrappy's advice and upgrade to win98. If you are sure that the mail is on the server and not on the machine then I would format and obtain a full version of 98 and load that.Keep in mind to save all important stuff to a floppy cause you are gonna lose eveything with a format.

I can't believe that upgrading from win95 to win98 is going to fix an email problem with Netscape.

Its not the netscape causeing the problem its a virtual devices driver causing the problem. I give upgrading to windows 98 and posiably updating you devices drivers about a 95% chance of fixing the problem.

One thing that you want to do is to go into netscape in explorer and copy the user folder to another media. CDR or RW would be good. Zip is another option. If you have to reload or reinstall, you can then copy the user folder back to netscape and retain your email, et al.

Just because the error is reported as an error in a file does not mean that file is at fault. In fact the opposite is normally true. Problems are usually caused by the program calling the DLL or VXD file incorrectly.