<b>Virtual PC 1.0.1 Updater; possible concerns
<b>Virtual PC 1.0.1 Updater; possible concerns
Michael Depsky wrote me to say that he had a problem with the update. After installing it, the Virtual PC application was apparently corrupted. When he launched it, he got an error message saying that he needed to reinstall Virtual PC.
I had my own more serious problem with the update. Installing the update went fine, including installing the updated components from within the Windows95 environment. However, when I went to quit Virtual PC (using the save for quick start option), the application crashed with a Type 10 error. This had never happened before. Upon restart, my Mac halted at the dreaded blinking question mark. I was able to launch from the Norton Utilities CD-ROM and discovered that my startup partition was now gone. Norton Disk Doctor found about a dozen problems and fixed them all. The next restart was normal.
These may be isolated problems. In my case, my copy of Virtual PC 1.0 may have already been corrupted and installing the update could have just made things worse. I am not yet convinced that there is a generic problem with the update. Still, I am a bit gun-shy for the moment and have deleted Virtual PC from my PowerBook 3400 hard drive.
If others have had similar problems, let me know.
Meanwhile, despite the slight knock of Norton Utilities (and Symantec's policies) on this page last week, it certainly came through for me today!
Update: Several readers (including Edward Ponikvar and Bob Soron) have noticed another glitch. The "Saved State" option no longer seems to work. When you restart, you get an error message stating that Windows was not shut down properly the last time, and you get dumped into the ScanDisk utility. Before my crash occurred, I noted the same problem as well. However, these users did not get the crash that I did.
Update: Several reports indicate that starting over with a clean install of 1.0, and then updating to 1.0.1, should eliminate the crash problems.