My PII 400 MHz runs Windows 98 with 128MB RAM, 60GB hard drive with a Creative Labs AWE64 Sound Card and 64 MB GeForce2 400 MX Video card. Recently I upgraded the video card and the size of my hard drive. Now, when closing down my PC, the following message appears: ‘Msgsrv32. An error has occurred in your program. To keep working anyway click Ignore and save your work in a new file. To quit this program click Close. You will lose information you entered since your last save’. I press Close. Then the following message appears: ‘Msgsrv32. This program caused a general fault protection fault at CTPNPSCN.DRV at ….’. I have visited the Creative Labs site to try to find an updated driver but couldn’t find any. Is there anything else I can do to resolve this problem?

The file CTPNPSCN.DRV stands for Creative Technologies Plug-and-Play Scanner. However, I have not been able to find a great deal of information about this file. The error which you are receiving is not the fault of MSGSRV32 (which is the 32-bit message server). One of the background functions MSGSRV32 performs in Windows is the loading of Windows drivers at startup and their unloading at shutdown. As you have probably deduced the problem is likely to be with the CTPNPSCN.DRV file being unloaded on shutdown. This file seems to be related to scanners. An article at the HP Technical Support website (although addressing a completely different problem to yours) www.hp.com/cposupport/scanners/support_doc/bps01829.html makes reference to the CTPNPSCN file. If you do not have a scanner installed, you may not require this file. We could therefore try to stop this file loading at startup (so it will not need to be unloaded at shutdown). Proceed with caution from this point on as I cannot be sure of the wider consequences should CTPNPSCN be prevented from loading at startup. Take careful note of all the actions you make and before editing anything, make sure that you know how to reverse the changes you have done. If you find that your Windows computer becomes unbootable after this, you will have to bootup in Safe Mode (by pressing F8 before the Windows splash screen when the ‘Windows 98 Starting’¦’ message appears) and reverse the changes. Proceed at your own risk.

Should you decide to proceed, go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ and type ’sysedit’ (without the quotes) and press OK. This will open the System Configuration Editor. Click the SYSTEM.INI window. Look at the [boot] section of the file and locate the line ‘drivers=mmsystem.dll’. You should notice that on this line there is CTPNPSCN.DRV or CTPNPSCN. Write down on some paper exactly what the line says before you make any changes. Then, delete the reference to CTPNPSCN[.DRV]. Go to the ‘File’ menu > ‘Save’. Now, go to the WIN.INI file and look at the [run] section of the file. Check if there is a line RUN=CTPNPSCN. If there is, place a semicolon at the front of the line (i.e. ;RUN=CTPNPSCN). This will prevent this line from being loaded. Go to the ‘File’ menu > ‘Save’ and then close the System Configuration Editor and reboot your computer. Hopefully Windows should load OK. Now try to shutdown your computer to see if the problem persists.