I managed to get a nice memory map by moving the pageframe up 1 row (using the M7 switch in EMM386), prohibiting UMBs above that and moving MSCDEX in the boot order. This fills my 81k of UMBs out of 90k available with very little fragmentation. It also increased XMS memory from 7100k to 7300k roughly. I will see if I can post a copy of my config and autoexec later.
On a related note however I'm having memory problems in windows 3.11. I tried to install Groliers Multimedia Encyclopedia 95, which was on the machine before, and it won't work properly. I have 1 primary partition (C) and 1 extended, split into several logical drives.
Running install from the CD (J) doesn't work and returns a not enough memory error.
Copying files to H (900MB) and running install does not work and returns a memory error.
Copying files to D (1GB) and running install does work.
...Running with J as my CD-ROM (which is true) loads but the encyclopedia doesn't work (no search results because of corrupt index?)
...Running with H as my CD-ROM (files copied to hdd) does not load at all. Memory error.
...Running with D as my CD-ROM (files copied) does not load at all. Memory error.
I'm not sure if this is related to the same <1MB memory that I just optimized in DOS or what but I'm sure it's not supposed to happen because this program ran fine in the past. I tried a couple of these "memory fragmenters" to force XMS to be used but they both did absolutely nothing. The only exacerbating thing is that I don't trust the CD-ROM. It works flawlessly transferring or reading data of any kind on any disk but it won't read music CDs 90% of the time and apparently doesn't like to stream data for something like an encyclopedia. I don't know if this is flaky driver compatibility, dirty laser or what. Too many variables for me to figure out but at the heart of it all is the memory error in Windows preventing me from installing and then running in all but the most specific set of circumstances and even then the thing won't work properly.
Any ideas?