Hi.

This may or may not be a compatibility problem (and it may take a while to explain), but it is driving me mad trying to solve it. Please help!

I'm running Windows NT 4.0 Workstation on a PIII450
with 128Mb RAM and a USR Sportster Flash V.90 External
modem (which I flash upgraded to V.90 myself). Windows
NT is installed on the first 4Gb partition of my 8.4Gb
hard drive, and SuSe Linux 6.1 is installed on the
other three partitions.

The above configuration has been working perfectly since
last September, but just this weekend, I have been having
some strange problems.

On Saturday morning, I booted up the machine, loaded
Windows NT and logged in as normal. I received an error
message telling me that "at least one" service had failed
to start up. On inspection of the event log, I found that
Remote Access had failed to start, since it could not
find one of it's configured devices (my USR Sporster on
COM 2). This means that I cannot use Dial-up Networking,
or anything else that relies on Remote Access, to access the
Internet, so I was, understandably, a little annoyed.

I dug out my Windows NT setup disks and installation CD-ROM
and repaired the installation. This worked for a time. I
re-installed Service Pack 5 from CD and rebooted and then
re-installed my graphics and sound drivers and rebooted
again. Then I re-installed the drivers for my modem (which
I had obtained a while ago from 3Com's site). Strangely
(or maybe not) I found that I could not re-install
Internet Explorer 5 (it told me that a previous setup
operation had not been completed). After a few more reboots,
The problem with the Remote Access occurred again, and I
found that when I tried to open the Modem section of the
Control Panel, nothing happened.

So, I reformatted Drive C and reinstalled Windows NT. Again,
I reapplied Service Pack 5 and my graphics, modem and sound
drivers. I then installed Netscape, Winamp and Microsoft
Flight Simulator 98. On trying to install IE5, I was again
told that a previous setup operation had not been completed.
I deleted some IE setup text files from C:\WINNT, rebooted
and it installed flawlessly.

After a couple of reboots, the problems with Remote Access
reoccured, and I am currently unable to access the Modem
properties page in the Control Panel. Remote Access is
obviously unable to access modem information as well, as the
error states that it cannot find the configured devices.
This means I am currently without Internet access under
Windows NT.

I am at a loss as to what to do next. Please could someone
offer some advice?

Is modem power on all time ?.

Yes, the modem is turned on before the
computer is powered up.

so how you getting here, Thur Win98 or Linux ?.

I'm posting using Netscape under SuSe Linux on the same machine.

the only thing I can think of is check the com port i/o & irq address in the Control Panel all so try manual set it up.
I don't this will help but may check it out go in to the bios make sure PnP OS = NO.

After re-installing NT yet again, I think I have found the problem - namely Flight Shop Converter 98, which is used to convert aircraft designed for old versions of MS Flight Sim for use with Flight Sim 98. I'll add it to the compatibility pages.