Win 98 thinks it's restarting always.

[Mikey]

Could somebody please tell me how I can unset the Windows 98 restart flag, wherever it is? I get the "Windows 98 is now restarting" message all the time, even when booting cold.

[kedawa]

I really don't know, but startup.ini or whatever other .ini files 98 uses would be a good place to start.

[Mikey]

Thanks. I'll post how this was fixed in case people are searching through Google for a solution to this problem and find this page.

Something gets set and read on startup even before the startup files are processed. The first thing I did was re-install the program that caused the inescapable DOS restart cycle. I'm not sure if that helped.

Then I restarted in pure DOS mode and typed Win to restart Windows, restarted in DOS and exited, and somewhere in trying those different restart procedures, whatever was telling Windows that every boot was a restart beacme un-set and I now get the normal "Starting Windows 98..." message.