I thought we had dropped support for win98?
It's certainly the case that no devs are testing on win98 any more, and there are other known bugs with it.
Anyway, yes the update check was added in 1.17.02.46 and you can disable it in the ini file as described. I'm not sure if that will remove the dependency on the dll altogether - please let me know either way. I'll see if I can force it off if win98 is detected (Pelya, is that what your special build does?).
Yes, i saw in the History file (by accident) that auto-updating could be disabled in the .ini, but by then i had loaded pelya's fix, which by the way, works perfectly.
As far as Win98 support, i hope we continue that for quite a while. There are a LOT of functional, perfectly fine Win98 applications that may never get updated to the latest Windows, and OpenMPT should be one of those. I'm not sure how different code-wise the latest Windows is, compared to Win98, but unless there's a jump like there seemed to be from DOS to Windows, backwards compatibility i would think should not be a huge problem.
As a Mac user, when Apple went to OS X, they incorporated so much Windows structure that they literally subverted their own customer base. They kept up with OS 9 for awhile (calling it "Classic" OS), but by OS 10.4, OS 9 hangers-on were being made to feel second-class. Now Apple makes or sells NO applications for OS 9 or before. I've tried OS X and it SUCKS. Purists like myself consider OS X to be a sellout to Bill Gates, and its customizability (if that's a word) is totally gone. (I used to be able to, without any knowledge of how to code, customize the interface of many of my apps.)
So what this means is, i continue to use the Classic OS (much like i still use Win98 on my emulator) because it's not complicated, still customizable, and by now VERY thoroughly tested. Plus, many of the classic applications are turning into freeware or abandonware.
But i digress....
Thanx, Pelya, your fix works perfectly.