Wow man, I'm so happy about that! I feel a little stupid for not realizing the problem earlier but sometimes it takes awhile for all the pieces to sink in. That's why going back and rereading all our progress over time helped out...somethings became clearer after the fact.
You were a real trouper in following along all this time, too, so my hat's off to ya.
If you still want that Lucent driver website, here it is:
http://www.808hi.com/56k/x2-lucent.htm
Lots of good info about the Lucent Winmodems here. You want the "Firmware Upgrade" link on this page. It's version 5.75 at present, but this page tells you everything you need to know about Lucent modems, how to upgrade the drivers, etc. On the firmware upgrades link, you want the driver (5.75) at the top of the page, NOT the brand name stuff at the bottom. The 5.75 driver is the latest.
Of course, if your modem is working fine now, upgrading the driver is up to you.
Edit: If you want to make sure your Windows Add/Remove programs finds your Windows CD correctly, you'll have to edit the registry to see what it has set for the "Install Path". Here's how to get to it.
Click Start, then click Run, then type in "regedit" (no quotes) and hit OK. Now, click on:
1. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
2. Software
3. Microsoft
4. Windows
5. CurrentVersion
6. Setup
So the path is:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup
Now, in the Setup section, you'll see lots of settings. Scroll down the list until you see "SourcePath". To the right of that entry is it's value, which should be your cdrom and the Win98 folder on it, in other words, if your cdrom is drive D:, it should say "D:\Win98\".
Make sure there's a backslash after the folder name. So, again, assuming your CDROM is your D: drive, your listing in the Setup section of that registry key will say:
SourcePath D:\Win98\
Doubleclick on the name "SourcePath" to edit the path itself. Of course, modify my example to point to your CDROM drive letter if it's different than D:.
Exit the registry.
Reboot.
(Fix the Sourcepath issue in the registry before doing anything below here)
New subject: With all the changes we made, you now effectively have NO power management going on on your PC...No ACPI, NO APM, etc. So, you won't get the benefits of things like shutting off your monitor/hard drives after a period of idle time. Your motherboard has even more powerful options with ACPI enabled. So, it's up to you whether you want to re-enable your power management or not.
I'd understand if you want to leave well enough alone, but since the USB problem was a files issue and not a hardware issue, it shouldn't (famous last words) present a problem.
So, IF you want to re-enable ACPI, let's undo that registry setting we did awhile back.
Click Start/Run/type in "regedit" (no quotes) and click OK.
Then click on the following
1. Click on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
2. Click on Software
3. Click on Microsoft
4. Click on Windows
5. Click on CurrentVersion
6. Click on Detect
So the key you want is:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Detect
Now, in a previous post, I had you create a "DWORD" string labeled "ACPIOption". It's current value should be 0x00000000 (0)
DoubleClick on the key "ACPIOption". You'll be able to change the value here. It defaults to "Hexidecimal". I want you to click on the "Decimal" circle so it puts a black dot in that circle, then change the value from "0" to "1". Then, click on OK.
After doing this, it should say:
ACPIOption 0x00000001 (1)
Now close the registry and reboot. After rebooting, go to Control Panel. Then, click Add/Remove Hardware. Let it search for BOTH Pci AND Non-PCI hardware. After that, it will tell you what hardware it found. Click on "Details". It should show you that it found the ACPI Bios. Click "Finished". It should install ACPI.
After it redetects (although it may not have to because it did it before and might have saved the registry settings it found), let Windows finish booting and then go to Device Manager and see if everything is running without conflicts.
If everything is running OK in Device Manager, you should be good to go!
Congrats again and thanks for the kind words. Happy USBing...