Beta blues

I know Beta is frequently a term for stuff that doesn't quite work and in this case really doesn't quite work, though I really like Blogger Beta and Yahoo Mail Beta. It seems IE only runs in the Win98 bottle. I suspect that Win XP and even 2000 have too many subsets that are needed to work correctly and since those OS's are still supported Microsoft is being too tight with code to let them function anywhere but in a full Windows enviroment. So thank goodness for BootCamp. I can do all the stuff I need with Windows in a dual boot. Howerver I am still intregued by running Windows apps in bottles and the ease of moving from Mac app to Windows app, so I'm not ready to throw up my hands and give up. Besides that's not really my style. I'm more inclined to latch on and not let go until I resolve it.

So here's where things stand. IE runs in Win98 bottle and WMP 6.4 and 7.1 worked like a charm. Codecs all loaded flawlessly and I could still play my audio file. Then I stepped up to WMP9 and it does kind of work. When I click a file in IE, WMP 9 loads and even begins playing the file, but part way through I get the dreaded "We are sorry but WMP has encountered a problem and needs to shut down. We are sorry for the inconvenience." With only an OK button so there really is no option but to let it shut down. If I reopen WMP I get an Interent Script Error 80040154 which Microsoft Support has linked to missing Directx files. But although I ran that update it made no difference. Of course part of this is that I only have this running in the Win98 bottle and MS doesn't support 98 anymore for all intents and purposes. Since they still support 2000 and XP it would ge better to get the apps running there but I suspect the support is why it can run in 98 and not 2000/xp. Microsoft doesn't really care if it runs in 98, they don't support it. They do however support 2000/xp and they are trying to close all the loopholes that get exploited and thus have made getting all this to work in non-windows is nearly impossible. Note I still say nearly.