Solving the ODBC crash in Windows 98 with IE5
By Alex Buchanan

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Symptoms
After having installed Internet Explorer 5, Microsoft's Personal Web Server (PWS ) crashes after a script refers to a database through ODBC. The entire operating system would then start displaying problems, requiring a hard boot. No data was lost, only time.

Who might have this problem
Systems running Windows 95 or Windows 98 equipped with PWS 4.0 and accessing a database using ODBC.

There were no reports of this problem occuring on Windows NT.

What caused this
When Internet Explorer 5 was installed, it updated all ODBC DLLs as well as the ODBC Administration menu. When a ASP script opens a database, it seemed to leave threads running in both the PWS and the operating system, causing the above symptoms.

Several developers/acquaintances have also reported this problem, while others claim everything works fine. The following solution should only be implemented if you are experiencing this problem.

Solution

1. Find your PWS installation files (on the Win98 CD-Rom, D:\Add-ons\Pws)
2. Double-click (open) Odbc.cab
3. Select all the files, right-click then click Extract
4. Extract the files to C:\Windows\System
5. In C:\Windows\System, delete the following files: odbccp32.dll and odbcint.dll
6. In C:\Windows\System, rename odbccp32.dll1 to odbccp32.dll and rename odbcint.dll1 to odbcint.dll
7. Reboot your computer.

This extracts the original ODBC files and overwrites the faulty ones. There have been no problems with this solution although it's an unofficial fix.

The word from Redmond...
This problem is not discussed in the Microsoft knowledgebase nor is it acknowled ged by Microsoft. An official solution or fix will be posted here once it is released by Microsoft.

Happy Programming!

Please email me if you have any problems or comments regarding this solution.