I have a Pentium III running Windows 98 with Outlook Express 5 for email. Intermittently, the message appears ‘A Fatal Exception 0E has occurred at O15F:BFF9DBA7. Press any key to continue’. Then when I press a key another error message comes up ‘A Fatal Error has occurred. An exception 0E has occurred at 0028:C15D4FA9 in VxD AFVXD (01)00001649 called from 0028:C1840514 in VxD PPPMAC (04) 000079B4′. Do you have any suggestions as how to remedy this?

0E errors are notoriously hard to diagnose but as you have provided the VXD’s in which the problem is occurring we do have a chance. Both AFVXD.VXD and PPPMAC.VXD are components of Dial-Up Networking. I suggest that you try to reinstall Dial-Up Networking. Be warned though, this is a very complex procedure. There is a very well written article at Microsoft Knowledge Base on how to do the reinstall procedure. The article can be found at support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q181/5/99.asp. Make sure that you read and understand this article and the associated article on extracting Windows files BEFORE attempting the procedure. Also, make sure that you understand how to extract original files from your Windows CD and know the CAB files which contain the files you will need to extract (this will be explained in the article). I also suggest that you backup your files in the event that something goes wrong and you need to reinstall Windows. You will also need to print out the Microsoft Knowledge Base articles before you attempt the procedure as you will not be able to view them when you are carrying out the procedure because you will be uninstalling the internet connectivity for Windows (Dial-Up Networking)! Make sure that you note down all of your Dial-Up Networking settings (eg. your ISP’s phone number) before attempting the procedure as these will be lost in the reinstall.