Author: Nafcom

One of the settings that are now enabled when updating your Vivaldi installation to 7.1 and up is, that the browser won’t stop running completely when closed, which is a problem e.g. when you have full-screen applications like gaming and the M3 mail notfications of new emails coming in keep popping up, or the bug that POP3 emails no longer are populated into your inbox anymore, appears.

Rather than always manually kill the process using Windows task manager, you can disable this behavior!

I found the solution thanks to this thread on reddit, however it’s outdated.

The current way of finding this setting and disabling is, is, going to the address
chrome://settings –> settings, there you can find the option “Continue running background apps when Vivaldi is closed”, disable it.

Key Takeaways

• New iTunes versions (like 12.13.9.1) can dynamically remove features if an iPhone isn’t recognized during installation. Which can be a problem is iPhone detection is a bit wonky, as in my case with a new PC freshly built in May 2025 and freshly installed Windows 11 (had to install it twice!).

• Old drivers can persist in Windows even if the software was never installed. (in my case Apple iPhone drivers of Tenorshare Inc., despite I never had their 3rd party iPhone Management Software installed on this machine.

• It can happen that updating to newer iTunes versions like 12.13.9.1 and up, still causes the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch functionality being removed from iTunes. it can be safely skipped for now, as long as iTunes works and the iPhone is recognized. However, future iOS updates might eventually require a newer iTunes version.
  
  
  Step-By-Step instructions how to go about

1. Identified the problem:
   • Windows had an old Tenorshare driver (oem11.inf) in its driver store.
   • This caused iTunes to fail to detect the iPhone correctly.
   • So, I uninstalled the new iTunes 12.13.9.1 (release date 2025-10-15) and downloaded previous version iTunes 12.10.11 (release date March 08, 2024, changelog / alternative download)
   • faced error message “Can’t read iTunes library because it was created by a newer version”
   • Went to my iTunes music folder (usually):
     
     C:\Users\<yourname>\Music\iTunes\
     Renamed
     iTunes Library.itl → iTunes Library (newer).itl
     Started iTunes 12.12.10.1 again.
2. Driver cleanup:
   • Used pnputil in the Administrator Command Prompt to list with pnputil /enum-drivers
   • Found it’s driver “oem11.inf” in my case
   • Removed Tenorshare drivers: pnputil /delete-driver oem11.inf /uninstall /force
   • After removal, Windows correctly used the Apple driver (from 2017) for the iPhone when I reconnected my iPhone.
3. Ensuring iTunes recognition:
   • Restarted the Apple Mobile Device Service to fix “No iPhone found” in iTunes.
   • Confirmed that the iPhone is recognized properly after reconnecting.

TL;DR: The older iTunes version 12.10.11 works better with iPhones on Windows 11, since newer versions disable device support if no iPhone is connected during installation.

You will need to use ScummVM for this

after that is installed, do the following:

1) Run Setup.EXE in the “CD Rom Root/GamePack” folder
2) You receive an error messsage that 16 bit versions of Install Shield, but there is a way to replace the routine with a 32bit one. Click on “More Information…”
3) this opens page https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troub … plications
4) Click on download and install the 16-bit InstallShield Support package
5) After installation, repeat Step 1)
6) The Game Pack installs now
7) add game one by one, and finally all 4 games of the game pack are found and listed in ScummVM.
8) copy all the *.VGA files from the CD to the SimonGamePack folder on the SSD’s game install folder

When updating to the latest Vivaldi version, i.e. its major 7.6 release, I noticed, that certain websites no longer displayed or youtube running super slow experiecing issues and the “how to fix” or “learn why” links on either sites, didn’t provide any solution or help for me.

It turns out, that the default settings of your browser, even when updating from a previous version of Vivaldi, have changed, and therefore your settings are overwritten and new rules are applied without warning, prompting or prior notice!

So, I did resume a broken functionality at Vivaldi first, so when I reported the issues with youtube and winfuture.de, I received the following:

Vivaldi Team wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Thanks for reporting this issue.
>
> Issue can be caused by strict ad and tracker blocking, and depends which block list is used in Settings → Privacy → Tracker and Ad Blocking → Manage Sources.
>
> Please [disable Vivaldi Blocker for the site]([1]https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/tracking-and-ad-blocking/#Blocking_per_site).
>
> If you use a ad/tracker-blocker extension, disable for the site.
>
> Thank you for your time and using Vivaldi!
>
> Best wishes,
> —————————————————————————————-
> [1] https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/tracking-and-ad-blocking/#Blocking_per_site

turns out the following settings have been altered from:

why does it put it to blocking enabled for trackers and ads and enabled Proton VPN automatically without asking me when I updated to 7.6?

This is almost a scandal.

The browser should let me change settings in my own will only!

Anyway, it works now as expected, again.

So the new OS version 25H2 of Win11 created new issues, what worked fine in Win 11 24H2 no longer does.

One of the examples here is the Sonic & All Stars Transformed Collection.

Issue no one is that the config tool does still not open (didn’t open in 24H2 either), her browse the install folder and double click to run “Launcher.exe” manually.

A new isssue however is this problem here as soon as you try to start the game:

its failing at running the install script because dotnet4 stops with error that it is already shipped with this version of windows.

delete the file “installscript.vdf” in the installation folder of the game.

After that, the game will launch again.

Once in a while you come across a game that seems to be unplayable, as it either runs too fast or certain actions like jumps cannot be mastered, in this case the game is tailored towards the Hz of your monitor, and since many modern systems have 120 Hz, 144 Hz, 165 Hz or even more and a lack of VSync in the game, you have to manually fix the game in question to a fixed frame rate.

In my case of owning an Nvidia RTX 4060 at the moment, here are some examples I came across:

–MURDERED: SOUL SUSPECT™: Frame rate remains unstable, no matter if VSync is n or off within the game: Max Frame rate setting necessary: 58 FPS, Bonus: If you Can’t walk past a demon because of a glitch with the priest, toggle VSync.

Nubarron: The adventure of an unlucky gnome: If you find yourself being Stuck because Triple mudslide and brambles jumps have a too narrow margin for error thrice: Max Frame rate setting necessary: 60 FPS

Double Dragon Advance: Game runs too fast, and certain gaps are impossible to jump over: Max Frame rate necessary: 58 FPS

Double Dragon IV: certain gaps are impossible to jump over: Max Frame rate necessary: 60 FPS

Super Double Dragon: Game emulation runs too fast: Max Frame rate necessary: 60 FPS

here is how to fix it with any game that support Steam Cloud Saving in the future if that ever happens to you with any game again:

Switch from within the game back to Steam (E.g. CRTL & Enter to switch to Window mode, Windows Key, or AlT & Tab or CRTL & ALT & Del,. depending on the game, in Steam, go to your library to the game ypu have issues with –> right click –> properties –> disable Steam Cloud –> Kill the game using WIndows Task Manager

This way your savegame that is still fine and lives online on the Steam Cloud Servers are not synced with the broken local ones when exiting the game.

In this moment, it is a good idea to make a backup copy of your local savegame folder just in case, tho

Now, re-enable Steam Cloud in the games properties in Steam and Play the game again, this way the intact savegame files are downloaded from the Steam Cloud and the corrupted local ones being overwritten, and voilla 🙂

The good: The final patch for the game has officially SecurRom removed so that the game runs under Windows 7 and up without a no-CD patch.

The bad: The developers never tested it – also most 1.4.3 updates require the previous update being applied 1.3.3 beforehand.

Despite the German description contradicting itself, by first stating the update 1.3.3 is included, and later on claiming 1.3.3 has to be installed first, this patch’s RAR archive really includes everything needed to update the master version 1.1.1 to 1.4.3 in one go!

Furthermore, make sure that all secondary monitors are disabled and when asked by Windows compatibility assistant after closing the game if compatibility mode should be applied, select “Program ran flawlessly”!

Caution! Do not run the game after installation! Apply the above patch first! Trying to run the game before, will cause the Starforce2 copy protection to install and Windows 11 will refuse to boot as a consequence!:

You can work around this by selecting “7) Disable driver signature enforcement” in the Startup Settings Menu (F8) .

After Windows 11 has booted up completely, run StarForce’s Driver Remover Utility.

After the next reboot, Windows 11 will boot up again flawlessly.

First: For the first installment of the game series, getting the Steam version to run is a bit finicky:
More in detail described at the Steam Community post “FIX Game start 2024“

What actually appears to happen, if you try often enough, instead of “nice1.exe is experiencing an error and has to close” you get an “Unknown error while trying to iniciate MCI Device” error. which then re-draws the window and you are in the game.

However in Windows 11 24H2 you have no mouse or any way of selecting any option and a few seconds in, it will leave full screen and it won’t re-draw the window ever again.

All hitting “esc” or “Enter” does, is prompting the “nice1.exe is experiencing an error and has to close” error in the background without you seeing much of it.

If you however try again and you are lucky, the mouse arrow appears and you are lucky and can play the game. The reason all this is happening is, it tries to initialize the intro of the game which fails, and after 4 times of trying, the game appears to give up on trying and falls back to showing you the main menu instead.

However, if you speak German, it might be a better idea to get a copy of the game, as the game runs natively fine on Windows 11 24H2. Many releases however are without the CD Audio and then have the file “cdsnd.off” on them.

Final and proper solution for the English version:

It appears the Nice1-4.exes start the game using different directX compatibility layers, for me simply starting Nice3.exe worked flawlessly.

You can edit the “game.bat” to call this instead of the default nice1, then the game will also run via Steam’s Play button.

You can however get the Soundtrack for free on Steam as a separated soundtrack release: Have a N.I.C.E day! Soundtrack.

Info in English how to check controls, can be found in this post on Steam

For N.I.C.E. 2, I’d suggest using DDrawCompat as it fixes crashes when trying to initilizes the races and make controllers work as well! More in this Steam Guide.

Also for this, get the Soundtrack of N.I.C.E. 2 for free from Steam

This is a collection of findings by the press, by Saber / 3D Realms themselves and the IT press to allow you a better performance on old hardware and perhaps less crashes depending the circumstances for the newly released “Tempest Rising”.

First of all the used Unity5 engine is known to cause incompatibility to AMD GPUs when DirectX 12 is used, hence an option to start the game under DirectX 11 has been included as a start option when running the game in Steam.

Furthermore the latest GameReady drivers from Nvidia do have known issues to overheat or blackscreen in games in general (see more info for release 576.02 at the GeForce GRD 576.02 Feedback Thread (Released 4/16/25) ).

To use DirectX 11 in a better performance way and with – under some circumstances – fewer or no crashes, it is advised that DXVK can be used, with details how to place the necessary DLL files into the game’s folder in a Steam community post.

Since it does not tell you how to obtain the right package to take those from, and most DXVK manuals are written for Linux, an unofficial but detailed set of instructions for Windows can be found in the reddit post “A guide to DXVK on Windows“.

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