I have windows 95 running on a Pentium 150. A problem arose after installing Netscape Communicator 4.7, but before this, Netscape 4.61 was installed but didn’t play up at all. About 75% of the time running this program causes a General Protection Fault in ADVERT.DLL. This dialogue box is unclosable (even the Program Dialogue box is inaccessible) but everything else runs normally. I uninstalled Version 4.7 and reinstalled 4.61 thinking that it would solve the problem. But it still happens. In the process of shutting down, it freezes at the Windows 95 logo and never actually shuts down. I have to resort to resetting the computer in these situations and let Scandisk before loading Windows again. Everything is still fine and there are no bad clusters detected. This is very frustrating and I am not prepared to reformat my hard drive. Your help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

You will be interested to know that many other people are also experiencing these problems. ADVERT.DLL is actually not part of Netscape but part of some third-party applications (eg. CuteFTP, GoZilla, etc…). To fix this problem, I suggest that you go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Find’ > ‘Files or Folders’ and search for this file. Once you have found it, rename it to ‘ADVERT.BAK’. This should solve your immediate problem with Netscape crashing. However, by renaming this file you may find that associated applications (eg. CuteFTP, GoZilla, etc…) may not function correctly or at all. In this case, simply rename the file back to ‘ADVERT.DLL’ whenever you want to use applications which are associated with that file. Regarding your second query on Windows 95 hanging at the shutdown logo screen, I will refer you to an article in Microsoft Knowledge Base which explains how to diagnose and fix Windows 95 shutdown problems. The URL is: support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q145/9/26.ASP where there is a neatly set out and easy to understand explanation and possible solutions.