Sometimes, when I spend about 2 hours or more in a full-screen DOS session, upon exiting back into Windows 98 the screen goes blank and the computer locks up. The Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) says that FindFast and MMsys are not responding, but when I try to end one of them the computer locks up completely. What’s happening and what can I do to stop it?

I am not certain why FindFast and MMsys hang when you get out of a long DOS session because I have not seen this happen before. I have done some research and found out that MMsys is actually a file called MMSYS.CPL which is the control panel for ‘Multimedia Shell Extensions’ but that doesn’t really get us anywhere in figuring out why the computer is crashing. I suggest that before you go into a DOS session, you do a CTRL-ALT-DEL and manually close FindFast and Mmsys. In this way, they are not running when you come out of the DOS session and thus can’t crash. This will only work however if FindFast and MMsys are files which are not essential to the operation of your computer. If that is the case, a better solution might be found in the methods I outlined in the second question in this column. In particular you might consider shutting down Windows into MS-DOS mode since it really isn’t a good idea to run a DOS session under Windows for that long anyway.