I have been using Windows 98 (the first edition) on my PC at home since October 1998 without any troubles — until last week (yes I know I’ve been lucky). I was using my 3COM video camera and was opening JPG images I had made a few weeks earlier tocompress them for selling things on eBay. Well, I got a blue screen GPF, rebooted and reminded myself that I only have 48MB of memory and should only keep 2 or 3 files open at the same time.
Then last week, for some reason, WordPad stopped working. Everytime I try to open a WordPad document, I get the error, “Failed to create empty document.” I have spent about three hours at Microsoft’s site trying to find the answer. I used the ScanReg /fix DOS utility. I removed the WordPad key from the registry (as suggested in a Microsoft help file from their Knowledgebase). I removed WordPad using the Add/Remove utility in the Windows control panel and then added it back. I did a search at 3Com and found nothing about this error. I also have tried to get help from the CNet.com forums to no avail. How can I solve this seemingly little problem? Is there any way to reload Windows without loosing all of my data files?