This page addressing Year 2000 issues for the Windows 98 operating system covers the following areas -
Editor's Note - this page attempts to give you direct addresses to areas of interest conderning Windows 98, but given the volatility of direct page addresses in the Microsoft site, additional information will be posted at the top of this page in the future, and the old links left "as is." Or, go to the Microsoft home page and do a key word search on the text below.
"There is a vulneralbilty in the Tools Management Console Taskpads that could allow a malicious web-site operator to run executable programs on a visitor's computer," per Microsoft. Supposedly the code on any machine with an Internet connection is at risk. Corrective code is at ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/reskit/win98/taskpads/tmcpatch.exe.
Go to the following links to get information about the Windows 98 Operating System Year 2000 Compliance.
Microsoft Corporation has released Y2K compliance information on their web site. This is an excellent site for obtaining current information on Microsoft products and obtaining patches or "work-arounds" for Microsoft software. However, you should ensure a patch is absolutely necessary and fully tested by your organization in a non-production environment before utilizing ANY Y2K software patches!
The system file checker utility (SFC.EXE), a utility that verifies the integrity of system files, has a problem that may make the computer unbootable or trigger a protection fault error message. This problem often shows up when the SFC program is used to restore some Windows 98 system files - such as KRNL386.EXE, or USER.EXE - from a Windows 98 CAB file.
To get around this problem, shut down the computer, insert the Windows 98 startup disk, and restart the computer. From the choices menu, select "Start Computer with CD-ROM Support". Go to the DOS prompt, use the EXTRACT command to get the desired filem from the correct CAB file. (Note that EXTRACT /? gives a help display for EXTRACT.)
From - "Practical Windows", November 1999
A Second Edition upgrade for Windows 98 has been released. A subset of the upgrade has several year 2000 fixes and is available on CD-ROM (call 888-287-9755 and ask for the SP1 CD - $5.00), or many of the features are downloadable via the web. Go to Windows 98 upgrades; href="http://windows.update.microsoft.com/v3contentA/Descriptions/2/3006/0x00000409/w98sp1.htm for a description. Many of the files can be downloaded from - Windows 98 upgrade files; http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/
Windows 98 may not return a correct date after the year 2000 if the display format is not set to MMDDYYY.
To set the year display to show the full 4-digit year -
Replacing file COM-CTL32.DLL is also supposed to correct this problem.
An excellent discussion of the interactions between various Windows operating systems and the BIOS is at Micro Firmware's article on "The Y2K Date Rollover Problem on PC Systems." by Terry Slade. Some of that article's comments are worth repeating here -
"... If the system is running under WIN3.1x over the century change, the date should roll over properly, just it would under DOS, but after rebooting the system it would show a date of 01-04-1980.
"Windows 95 also does not correct for the date rollover problem, although it may appear to if testing is not done carefully.
"Windows 98 does appear to correct for the date rollover problem, however this correction is thwarted if the system is booted from a DOS diskette on the first boot after the century change. The date would then be 01/04/80 and when Windows 98 is restarted it will keep this date until manually changed."
The following is an excerpt from a special edition of the Office Enterprise Insider newsletter -
"Because we want to ensure that customers feel comfortable with the privacy of their Office 97 documents, Microsoft has decided to help users remove the unique identifier number from documents. As of next week, the following free patches will be available for you to download* from the Office Update Web site: