It wasn't USB. The USB update for Win98 first edition allowed the Karma to be recognized, and her machine was able to do the firmware update just fine. If the problem was in the USB area, perhaps the mass storage driver, assuming the firmware update doesn't use that? If the firmware update writes a file directly to the drive, then it can't be that either.

As far as I can tell the reason RMM won't work is calls into WMVCORE.DLL that don't exist in windows media 7.1 (but should exist in windows media 9.0). Of course, there could be other problems.

My understanding of Windows 98 SE is that there is neither an upgrade CD nor a full installer CD: it was only made available to OEM hardware manufacturers.

We talked about upgrading to Win2K, but as it's an 80MB RAM/3GB across two hard drives machine, that's not an option without some additional hardware or a new machine.

But yeah, I understand the "five OSs, plus n languages each is enough environments to test" issue way too deeply.

-brendan