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You are a member of a very small club: the people who had trouble installing a VRML browser. Old VRML hands
talk among ourselves as though it's worse than it really is (one respected member of www-vrml said
"Installing a VRML plugin is like installing a DOS game") but we tend to perform unnatural acts like
running a half dozen different plugins on our machines. Let's see if we can help.
The solutions I've got are mostly specific to Windows 95, but perhaps you'll find a clue here to what's gone wrong on your system.
Let's get the major cause of problems out of the way first: you may have multiple plugins on your machine, perhaps without even knowing it. Read what the Multi-Plugins page says about DLLs and search your plugins directory to make sure you have only one of the DLLs in the table. Also look in the Control Panel's Add/Remove Programs window to see if there are two VRML plugins when you only want one.
If your symptom is that Netscape crashes when you try to view a simple VRML world like the ones on our "Browser Test" page, or it crashes when you exit from a simple VRML world, you have a Classpath problem. Read what the Multi-Plugins page says about Classpaths. Your best bet might be to go to the Control Panel, pick Add/Remove Programs, and uninstall all your VRML plugins and reinstall the new one.
That out of the way, let's look at simple fixes first and then get on to the more complicated ones.
It may be that the problem isn't with your VRML plugin at all, but rather with the world you're trying to view. Go to the "Browser Test" page and see if it you can see at least one of the two worlds there. If so, then either the VRML world you were trying to look at is bad, or it uses a feature of VRML that breaks your browser. Knock that world off your bookmarks and get on with your life.
I can't get Sony's DirectX version of Community Place to work on my machine. After a couple of tries, I gave up and downloaded their Renderware version and it works fine. I have no idea why, but I haven't got time to figure it out. Go and do likewise.
The next thing to check is to see if your installation file is bad. A bad network connection might have truncated it, or you might have inadvertently copied it to your machine in ASCII format instead of binary.
Many of the browser makers show the size of their download files so you can check yours against theirs. If they have an FTP site, you can generally look at the file size there. If the file size is wrong, get a good one and try to reinstall.
Sometimes, on some machines, in some meteorological conditions simply reinstalling the plugin will work. Give that a try; you have very little to lose. And this time, if the install program recommends that you do something, do it.
Should that fail, go to the Control Panel, select Add/Remove Programs, uninstall all the Netscape plugins, uninstall Netscape Navigator, then go back and re-install Netscape Navigator in a different directory than it was originally installed in. Make sure you take your Mail and News folders and your bookmarks, address book and signature files and copy them into the new directory for Netscape.
Head for the Control Panel again and see if the installation of Netscape also installed Live3D. If it did, uninstall Live3D, then install your VRML plugin before you install any other plugin. I've never seen it happen, but I believe that one plugin could theoretically interfere with another.
If you do this without making a backup copy of the Registry, you're crazy.
Uninstall Netscape and all its plugins just as you did in the previous step. Now go into the registry using
regedit.exe and look for every occurrence of the names of all the folders you've ever used to install
Netscape. Remove every single reference to those folders. If you find a Netscape key under Software, delete it
and everything under it. For the key values for filetypes, just rename them to "C:\Foo" or something
similar so that you know you aren't pointing to anything involved with Netscape.
Now save your Mail and News folders and your bookmarks, address book and signature files in some other directory and completely delete the folder in which Netscape was installed. If you get a complaint that "this may affect one or more registered programs", go back into the registry and find that reference.
Now reinstall Netscape in a folder with a name you've never used before for installing Netscape. If you can, put it on a different disk drive.
Proceed to your favorite building supply store, purchase a large hammer, and apply it to either your computer or your head. If you are an employee of the Post Office, you know what to do.
Did I leave out a good tip you know about? Let me know.
-- Bob Crispen