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Windows ME problem with regenv32.exe (I think)

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willyk

Experienced Member
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Nov 22, 2006
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New Hampshire
I've switched to XP for the machines I use reguarly, but it will soon be beyond support also.
Am a simplistic guy and used Win9x a long time. I'd like to keep a few of my WinME machines running if possible. One of them has started to act weird at boot. Pretty sure it is related to regenv32.exe. There is a moderate amount of info on this via google. Most people say they fixed their problem by re-installing the file. Some say its a virus, and that maybe my case. The original file is 60kb, if I replace it it grows to 76kb and the date is changed. Seems odd.

This occurs on one of several computers I have running ME, not any of the others. Sadly I either did not obtain any malware removal software for this OS, or was not even aware of it. I'm not even sure it is a virus, but am curious.

The symptom is that on this machine when I boot I get the WinME logo briefly. Then the cursor and hour glass are in the center of the screen together. Normally this lasts for less than a minute on a good OS. On this machine it repeatedly lasts 25-30 minutes, then the machine boots and all is well. What is it doing? Seems to run well after this.

Any suggestions or ME guru's out there?

Thanks.
 
When the file grows larger and gets a new date, copy it onto a floppy, stick it in an XP machine and run some antivirus software on it. You never know, it might tell you something. If not, well, it was quick and cheap. :)
 
willyk said:
I've switched to XP for the machines I use reguarly, but it will soon be beyond support also.
Click to expand...

Consider Windows 7 32-bit version. Most of what you run in XP can run in Win7 32-bit, and you don't need to upgrade your hardware if you have 256+ MB.

Any suggestions or ME guru's out there?
Click to expand...

Get rid of ME. I consider it one of the top three worst versions of Windows ever produced, next to Windows 1.0 and Windows Vista. Windows ME is where you can see "Microsoft Cancer" spread realtime, as you are now witnessing.

Either go back down to 98SE if your system has less than 256MB RAM, or go up to XP, or hell even go to Windows Fundamentals. Just get off of ME.
 
Depending upon the capabilities of your machine, you may even want to load Linux as your primary OS and run Windows 9x or XP in virtual machines, a la VirtualBox. The bulk of my work is done on Linux, with only an occasional foray into Win9x or XP. (I've got Win 7 and Win 8 in both 32 and 64-bit platforms, but have yet found a reason to load them up and run them).

One thing that VBox does get you is a more-or-less conventional-appearing hardware interface, so you don't have to go trolling the web for drviers.
 
But the question is, what is it doing when it is just sitting there? Is it thrashing the hard drive like it is out of memory? Does it look like the hard drive is stalling while reading? Is there any network activity or attempted activity while it is sitting there? Each of those indicate different potential problems.

Personally, I would start with a full disk test. Yank the drive out, attach it to newer computer, boot a Linux CD, and then "dd" the drive device back to itself. That will rewrite all sectors and force it to mark any problem ones as bad. Then check the SMART status, if the drive supports that. While you are at it, you can mount the drive under Windows XP/7 and scan the disk with a virus scanner.

If it looks like the drive is thrashing, try recreating the swap file. Check that enough memory really is available (in case a bank of chips just up and died). There are various ways to check and disable programs that start up at boot.

Win9x/ME tends to just sit around and twiddle its thumbs when trying to restore connections to file servers. Check in My Computer to see if it trying to re-map old network drives that don't exist any more.

Beyond that, sometimes you have to just reformat and re-install. True of any sufficiently complex OS really. For compatiblity, Windows 98SE is usually the best bet. But whatever floats your boat. Windows ME throws a monkey wrench in much of the DOS support even though it is technically all still there. Also, vendors were really supposed to update their drivers for Windows ME, but since most 9x drivers "worked", and ME was the last in this line, not everyone did, leaving many stability issues.
 
You can install an old version of Malwarebytes and see if you have a virus, Trojan, malware etc. Personally when any version of Win 9x got old and bloated I just did a reformat and install.

There are a lot of hardware drivers that never made it out of the Win95 era (companies going under, never bother to update drivers that were buggy to begin with) that caused issues with Win ME. If you had a new machine that came out after ME was released you probably had decent drivers and that machine was pretty stable (at least I had one that was at the time).
 
This may be off the wall, but, regenv32.exe is part of the registry save/restore software. It's basically saving your settings at shutdown. If you have one of the early ATX systems, when you shut them down power to the motherboard shuts off before Windows is finished shutting down and your files get corrupted. Hopefully there is someone who remembers this and can explain it better than I can off the top of my head. :)
 
One of the many functions of my tweener is to run ME as a print server for my dot matrix printer. Since the tweener has a parallel port and the newer machines don't it turns out to be quite a valuable service. Besides that, with its mobile hard drive racks the tweener runs many DOS versions including DOS 7 from a FAT32 hard drive, XP, XPPRO, 98SE, 95 and all effortlessly as they are all on their own drives that can be interchanged via the mobile rack with ease. So even ME has a place in my setup.
 
GottaLottaStuff said:
This may be off the wall, but, regenv32.exe is part of the registry save/restore software. It's basically saving your settings at shutdown. If you have one of the early ATX systems, when you shut them down power to the motherboard shuts off before Windows is finished shutting down and your files get corrupted. Hopefully there is someone who remembers this and can explain it better than I can off the top of my head. :)
Click to expand...

I had one that did something like that. Disable power management in the BIOS or forcibly prevent it working in the OS via Device Manager.
 
Trixter said:
Get rid of ME. I consider it one of the top three worst versions of Windows ever produced, next to Windows 1.0 and Windows Vista. Windows ME is where you can see "Microsoft Cancer" spread realtime, as you are now witnessing.
Click to expand...

For sure, I would have to say ME was the worst one they ever released, vista may have been a resource hog, but it wasnt THAT bad, and 1.0 was so early on, they get some slack, ME however, there was no excuse for, lol

Fundamentals/FLP is a good way to go on old PCs, but legitimately licensing it that is a pain, it was only ever licensed to corporate volume license clients, no legit way for your average home user to get their hands on it.

A nLite'ed copy of normal XP can be quite fast even on older hardware if you pear it down to the basics, and that can be done by anyone.
 
Thanks for the replies. The problem is solved. The machine was infected with a virus that Malwarebytes identifies as Tenga.A This nasty little virus does apparently attempt some network access and downloads, but it also is supposed to scan drives and infect and *.exe files which have both the original DOS header and the NEWEXE header introduced for windows. So it has to spend a lot of time whenever it runs to be sure everything on the system is infected. Nice. I assume that is what takes most of the time as it has to actually open all the *.exe to see what type they are, and if they are already infected. It did not look like the disk was thrashing, but its a pretty quite drive. I will play with it a little more, but at least I know what is wrong. At a later date I may post a question about system restore as I want to eliminate the restore points that would put this back!

Gold star for 'GottaLottaStuff', simple suggestion but one I had not thought of. Examining the offending file on a current machine with its virus engine identified the problem. Now I can have fun eliminating it.
I could have moved the entire drive to another machine, but didn't want that bother and turned out not to be required.

'Chuck(G)' mentioned virtual boxes in linux which is interesting and I will look into it. As I mentioned originally, my major problem with linux is that it doesn't support some of my devices and in general I have not had the energy to try to solve this problem, the virtual box may. I use linux a fair amount and normally have it installed on my machines in dual boot mode. This makes it easy to poke around on the WinME partition of the machine in question as I also have linux installed on it.

Almost everyone said get rid of ME. Interesting, I've used it reliably since it came out and have no complaints. I run a lot of MSDOS code as that's what I used early in my learning curve while discovering computer programming. Never felt the limitations everyone complains about with the DOS functionality under ME. That said, if it comes to reformating (seems like it may) I will probably fall back to Win98 SE as it would be fun to try that again.

For those who suggested a newer/current OS, thanks but you are completely missing the point. I'm an old retired programmer with nothing better to do that chase down and correct odd behavior that turns up. I belong to VCF because I like running some of the older machines with their original software. I rarely use the system and when I do its to perform network or serial port tests on an application running on a current system so speed is not an issue. However boot reliability does matter! I want some early Win9x machines around because some of my old hardware is no longer supported by XP and above. More than half of my wireless stuff is now unsupported and some of the cards are less than 10 years old. But I'm perfectly happy with Wireless-B as I grew up using serial lines to transfer data.

Thanks for the help.
 
willyk said:
'Chuck(G)' mentioned virtual boxes in linux which is interesting and I will look into it. As I mentioned originally, my major problem with linux is that it doesn't support some of my devices and in general I have not had the energy to try to solve this problem, the virtual box may.
Click to expand...

Curious, what devices do you have that Linux does not support?

An alternate option is to run a version of windows (xp or 7) that does support those devices, then run linux, windows me, etc. in virtual machines using virtualbox or equivalent.
 
My biggest single gripe with WinME is that it cannot shut down to MS-DOS. Yes, you can open an "MS-DOS Window", but that's not the same thing. Win98SE, particularly using the "unauthorized SP 2" pretty much does everything I need from Win9x Windows.
 
In my opinion a lighter OS is better than an heavy one, and Windows is heavy.
Another problem with many windows versions: they can't boot into console.
The only windows versions i'm running are WinNT4 Alpha on my PWS (works pretty well, never "BSoD"ed) and Win7 on my top-of-the-line station.
I'm still using Win7 because most of te applications i use runs under it, but if i could get a notebook with Win7, i'd put linux or solaris on my station immediately.
 
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