I have encountered a strange problem. I attempted to run win 98 setup and was halted by a message stating that a previous install was already in progress. I ask the owner and found they had tried to run the win98 se update disk after a networking problem where they deleted all of networking components. After rebooting to reload the networking windows responded saying they needed to run setup. They did but quit at the point where windows wanted to reboot unsure whether windows was about to reformat and destroy their data. I created a boot disk, booted windows, deleted deleted win.com and attempted to re-run setup. All went as planned until it said windows is getting ready to run for the first time and then it restores the registry with all the problems I went to stop. Can you tell me what file(s) or trigger(s) that tell windows that its in an install mode? What files are changed during the initial setup run? Thanks, Terry