Each time he would load Windows 3.1 he would get a message that the permanent swap file was corrupted. I did some research and found a note in one of the readme files that some laptops will not tolerate a permanent swap file, but work perfectly with a temporary one. So problem number one was solved when I deleted the corrupted permanent swap file and set up a temporary swap file.

Puzzle number two was a great deal more complicated. The laptop has both a built in trackball and a serial port which can connect to a conventional mouse. The regular mouse worked fine in Windows 95 but would not work reliably in DOS 6.22 or Windows 3.1. The track ball would work OK in all situations. I tried installing the mouse driver from Win 3.1, then the driver from DOS 6.22, then the track ball driver, none of which solved the problems. Since the computer has Microsoft's drivespace compression, I studies the host drive (H) for the compressed drive (C). A fact that is not obvious is that there is a duplicate set of configuration files (autoexec.bat and config.sys) on the H drive. I tried all the driver substitions on that drive and it still didn't work.

I next went into the Windows 3.1 directory and just scanned through all the initialization files, especially WIN.INI. There was no apparent problem there, and just as I was about to give up I noticed a mouse.ini file. It had only one line "type = serial2". I knew that the laptop only had one serial port, so I changed the line to read "type = serial1", and the problem was solved. The moral to this story is that before you give up, you should study all the (.ini) files in the Windows directory that might be even remotely related to your problem.

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