When Windows loads, the dialup networking window appears and to stop the message appearing the choice is either to connect to the Internet or press the ‘Cancel’ button 16 times. Is there any way of preventing this annoying request for a dialup connection? A second problem occurs with a digital image editing program and a video editing program. When loading either program, the following message appears: ‘Brooktree Capture Driver. BtViD: Failure loading VxD driver’. I cancel this message about 5 times before the software will finish loading. When loading the video software, another message appears: ‘Failed to initialize the video capture plug-in. Another program may be using it or the file has been moved. Device is already in use’. Both applications seem to work OK in spite of this, but when I try to shut down the computer, the machine freezes at the ‘Windows is shutting down’ screen. The system has is a 1.8 GHz Celeron running and Windows 98 SE.

To prevent the dial-up networking window appearing each time you start the computer, open Internet Explorer and go to the ‘Tools’ menu > ‘Internet Options’¦’. In the window that appears, click the ‘Connections’ tab. Under ‘Dial-up and Virtual Private Network settings’ enable ‘Never dial a connection’. The second problem you are experiencing relates to drivers for a video capture card. In your question, you didn’t mention whether you have a video capture device (e.g., TV tuner card) installed, so I assume that you don’t (as you also mentioned the software works OK). However, the software you are attempting to use seems to have the functionality to use a video capture device, but as you don’t have one installed it cannot load the drivers and is giving you the error message. To stop this error, if you really don’t have a video capture device installed, try to find a setting within the software which disables support for video capture. If you have trouble finding such a setting, contact me again with the exact name of the software packages and I will try to guide you through this process. In answer to your final query about Windows not shutting down correctly, have a look at the Microsoft Knowledge Base article support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=238096. Pay particular attention to the first point ‘Windows 98 Second Edition Shutdown Supplement’ which is a patch which may solve the problem you are experiencing. Follow the links to download the patch.