I have a dos game(steel panthers or SP1) that I have been running on win.95 and win.98 successfully for years under full screen dos. I recently had a crash a few weeks ago in the middle of the program. The screen locked up and the graphics split up like a puzzle over the screen. I did a ctrl-alt-del to terminate the app and restarted the game. It came back fine and I played it a few times after that. I then got a bright idea to install some specific game utilities just for SP1. Unfortunately one of them was for win3.1 only. I didn't notice that at the time. They were spHack and spcap(the win.3.1 utility). Now, the game starts to load and then locks up. The cdrom and the hard drive seem to go into some seek loop and the graphics never load up. I deleted all the utilities and the game and reinstalled the game only with no avail. I have tried everything I can think of with no success. Since it's a dos game no ini file or dll's are used, nor are there registry changes made at install. So what files could have been changed and what are the defaults? I deleted everything in my autoexec.bat and config.sys files. Tried installing it without sound, tried booting from a dos disk, tried running from dos mode. All I can figure is msdos.sys or some other config file is messed up! I have a PIII 733 dual tyan mb running a single process. Windows 98, but an early version, AGP video card, I don't recall the brand. I guess I don't understand enough about how dos runs under windows and what a dos install program does to figure this one out!

hmmmmm.... I use to use DOS a lot (talk about the frustrating days, except DOS has few problems compared to windows, rofl). But I'm not sure about yours... But you might wanna look through your registry to see if that Win3.1 program is in it, cause if that utility caused the error, and its still there, that might be what's causing your Trouble. If not... then I'm not sure. Goodluck though.

I will double-check again through regedit, but I tried that already. Fortunately I always make backup exported files of the registry, so I used an older "safe" copy and the problem didn't go away. I have used this to recover some major problems with a specific program successfully before. I still think it's somehow in the DOS configuration files under windows, so I am still looking there. This is a tough one as I haven't been able to pinpoint what produces the behavior. I assume it's the utility, but it could be something else! Any help or sympathy is appreciated!