Pontius,
Sorry about the cab-11/cab-17 stuff-up. You really had to do it the hard way, but glad you wirked through it.
After I posted I realised that you could have a different version of Win95 from mine and that the cab file could be different, but it was time for beddie-byes (prior to an early shift) so I was not able to persist.
For info, there is a switch in the extract command to find and extract a single file from somewhere within a chain of cab files, but my reason for not going that way was that you'd have had to copy all the cab files to your temp folder, and I'd convinced myself at the time that you only needed the 11th cab
To get a bit more info on extract open a DOS window and type extract then ENTER. That gives you a brief summary.
I sort of expected that re-installing kernel32.dll wouldn't fix the prob, but it was worth a shot - I think your Windows installation is sick and that Mac's suggestion is the way to go.
Do you have 2 hard drives, or more than one partition on a single drive. If so, and if necessary, you could save your data to a folder or folders in that other partition or drive (if there's room), then reformat the C: drive and re-install everything
without buying the extra hardware.
But Mac's suggestion is the better way to go if you can do it.
Sorry it didn't work out.
Cheers
AA