While troubleshooting my display problem (only 16 colors) I checked my device manager and found an exclamation point on my primary and secondary IDE. Can someone tell me what they are, and how do I fix them?

The primary IDE controllers are related to your hard drives and cdroms. An exclamation point means that there is a problem (usually a driver problem) with them. What you need to do is go back into device manager, highlight them and select "remove", then remove them from device manager. Then reboot computer and let windows redetect/reinstall them. You may need your Win98 cdrom when you do this. Also it's a good idea to back up any data beforehand. Let us know if this works or not. PS, it sounds like you also have a similar problem with your video card. Does that have an exclamation point also? Right now you're stuck in VGA mode.

Yes, I am stuck in 16 colors. I have three exclamation points.. two in the IDE controller thingie, and one in standard floppy disk controller. The video card does not seem to have any problems, although it says standard vga, and my video card is nVidia 128. I also have a problem with my cd rom, its non existant in win98se. It was there prior to me downloading the lastest Direct X (which was Sunday) I'm scared to delete anything because I dont know if my cd rom drive will come back. If I delete what you say, will that fix at least ONE of my problems?

If you're worried about removing them, you could try this: Go to Add New Hardware, let it attempt to find new hardware. It will probably not find anything. Then select Add a New Device (I believe this is the way in 9x but I'm thinkig in terms of 2K, so it may be a little different). Let it search for new hardware. When/if it fails to detect the problematic controllers, select manually the IDE/ATAPI controllers (in 9x it may say something like Hard Disk controllers instead). Now hopefully it will detect the controllers. If it doesn't see if there's an "other devices" listed, and then go through that. If this doesn't work I don't see what choice you have but to remove them in Device Manager. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think there's a way to remove that ActiveX control which is why they tell you to back up the registry whenever you install one of these. Have you tried doing a scanreg /restore from a bootdisk and selecting an older version of the registry (they're kept for 5 days only)? That could very possibily solve your problem. Also, have you searched the registry (using Find) for any "NOIDE" entries (sans quotes)? If you find any noide entry, delete it (export full registry first). If none of this works you're looking at reinstalling the OS or worse reformatting the drive. Please post back your progress if there's any.

BTW you're probably going to have to remove the video dispay adapter in Device Manager too. When you reboot Windows should detect new hardware, then you'll have to install the drivers. This works about 90% of the time, but I'm less certain in your case because it's an active X control causing the mess.

Forgot to mention: the reason you see no cdrom in My Computer is because it depends on the IDE controllers, which is the problem here. Your cdrom will reappear the moment the problem with the controllers is solved. It's possible but unlikely that you may need your 98 installation disk after you remove the problematic devices in Device Manager. So I'd have this ready to go just in case. Windows may prompt you for it after detecting new hardware.

Something you might want to check: Go to start, Run, then type dxdiag. Click on More help. See if there's a Restore option. If so you can roll back to previous version. Here's the help info on it: Restoring Drivers On some configurations, DirectX® Diagnostic Tool allows you to restore older audio and video drivers. This may be the best way of solving problems with incompatible drivers. If a Restore button appears on the More Help page, click this button to run the DirectX Setup program. DirectX Setup has two buttons labeled Restore Audio Drivers and Restore Display Drivers. Clicking either of these buttons restores drivers that were replaced when DirectX was installed on your system. If a button is disabled, you do not have older drivers to switch back to. In that case, contact the hardware manufacturer for the newest drivers. DirectX Setup also provides a checkbox to disable Direct3D hardware acceleration, which is something you can already do from within DxDiag. (See Overriding Default Behavior.)