Xy on Vista

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

I can just hear the groans of "Ichabod" from the DOS diehards
(and probably gasps of amazement from the bleeding edge crowd),
but my new laptop came with Vista Home Premium installed (I made
sure there are XP drivers if I want to downgrade). I'm still in
the process of getting rid of the eye-candy and making things
look the way they used to, but I have got Xy running quite nicely
(not U2 yet, as I need to install all the U2Utils; does that
batchfile Robert wrote a while back to automate the process work
under Vista, I wonder?)

Three gotchs so far, two solved and one no big deal:
1. If you create a shortcut to a DOS app, Vista apparently sticks
in that pointer to c:\windows\system32\autoexec.nt and config.nt.
Only problem is, at least on my system, there were no such files.
They exist in the root, are empty, and are ID'd as "dummy files
for NTVDM." Cure: copy said files to c:\windows\system32, and all
is well.
2. If you try (as I did to get around the error message the lack
of those two files was generating) to launch Xy from a DOS prompt
(CD c:\xy4
editor.exe)
you may be told you lack permission. You need to "raise your
rights" (even if you're logged in as admin) to do certain things
at the DOS prompt. I forget now exactly where one does this, but
the book I got told me.
3. In the shortcut's property page, I click on Change Icon,
navigate to editor.exe's directory, and choose one of the several
nice icons that various members of this list have contributed.
None of them will Vista accept: Apply stays grayed out, and the
icon remains a sheet of paper (I'm assuming that's what it's
supposed to be). I'm sure I can find something in the plethora of
icons Vista supplies, but what's the matter with our home-made
ones? They have the .ico extension.
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx