this patch rendered my win98se system un-bootable. i installed it on a compaq armada e500 laptop (p3 850mhz 440bx) with an ess maestro 2e soundcard. i switched from vxd to wdm drivers and everything checked out prior to the install. afterwards the system would boot to the desktop and play the windows startup sound, but then i would get an endless hourglass cursor and not be able to click on anything so my only recourse was a hard power-off.

i booted into a dos prompt and restored the original sbemul.sys, but this wasn't sufficient to render the system bootable. (i would recommend explicitly indicating the sbemul.sys path in your readme as you do for everything else. i think it's a hidden file so it was frustrating trying to locate it with a dos prompt unaided.) ultimately, i had to manually delete the vopl3.vxd to get back into windows and then run the uninstall.reg to clean things up.

the lockup in windows occurs suspiciously at the point when my wpa2 supplicant client (odyssey) would normally start--i never see the odyssey splash screen; however, i have no real evidence that any of this is connected. in any case, let me know if there's anything i can do to help track it down for you.

@stanwebber thanks for testing and sorry for the bad experience!

Yes, good idea about mentioning explicitly where the backup is located, I'll update that. Didn't do that because there is also an uninstall.bat, that unregisters and removes both VOPLSRV.EXE and VOPL3.VXD, and restores the original SBEMUL.SYS from the backup.
If the system does not boot into Windows, that uninstall.bat can still be run from DOS. It will remove VOPL3.VXD and VOPLSRV.EXE, restore SBEMUL.sys but fail at unregistering the two. Not a huge issue, during boot, windows will complain that it cannot find the VXD, you can press enter on that and it will boot normally. Then, either run again UNINSTALL.BAT from Windows or run only UNINSTALL.REG.

If you're willing to test some more, can you install it normally and before rebooting just remove (or better yet, rename) C:\VOPL3\VOPLSRV.EXE ?
If that works and it boots into Windows, please try to manually run the renamed VOPLSRV.EXE and see what happens.

renaming voplsrv.exe allows me to finish booting normally, but as soon as i rename and execute voplsrv.exe from within windows i get an endless hourglass cursor and have to hard power-off.

-when you get that hourglass cursor, is the mouse cursor still moving?
-does pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del do anything?

A few tests to run, all without the VOPLSRV.EXE binary (remove it or rename it), VXD must be installed, as well as your ESS WDM driver.
-with Media Player, play the attached .wav file and report if it works.

Attached archive that contains a couple of tests. Run them from an MS-DOS Command Prompt. Report if it freezes, and if there's any output in the console. If a specific test freezes, please reboot. If it does not, kill it with Ctrl+Alt+Del before proceeding to the next test (or reboot the system).

-test2, this is the VOPLSRV with normal priority, debug output and logging
-test3, this is the VOPLSRV with realtime priority, debug output and logging
-test4, VXD test, without registering the audio path, will exit after 30 seconds if it doesn't freeze the system
-test5 audio path test, 48Khz, without involving the VXD, will exit after 30 seconds if it doesn't freeze the system
-test6 audio path test, 44.1Khz, without involving the VXD, will exit after 30 seconds if it doesn't freeze the system

At the end, please attach C:\Srvtest*.log files, if any.