I have a 486/DX 100 and am using Windows 98. When I am on the net (it doesn’t matter how long, it could be 5 minutes or 5 hours) and a page is loading, sometimes I get this message in a box that appears. It has Explorer on the top of box and says: This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. If the problem persists, please contact the program vendor. Why does it do this? I really get annoyed. It also happens with this Screen Saver that I downloaded from the net. Please help.,

The reason that this is occurring is because in the webpages that you are trying to view, the author inserted a tag with a TYPE attribute but not a SRC attribute. In English, an tag is used to Embed a document of any type into a HTML document. The problem though is that the viewer needs to have a program that can actually view the embedded data, and not all do. Attributes (as the name suggests) provide additional information for the tags to use. In this case, the SRC tag is used to refer the internet address of the embedded data object in the webpage. The reason that the TYPE attribute won’t work is simply that Internet Explorer (which I assume you using) doesn’t support it. The TYPE attribute (with the tag) combine to specify a certain MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension) which is used to launch the program. After that mouthful, the easy solution to your problem is to goto the Microsoft website (www.microsoft.com) or use the ‘Windows Update’ feature of Windows 98 and download the Internet Explorer 4.01 Service Pack 1.