I couldn't make it to work, no matter what. I spent one entire evening
(and a good part of the night) trying different combinations of software
installation + plugging the wheel into the USB port, but the best I got
was a wheel with no FF. I was about to low- level format my HDD anyway
so I thought that was the perfect moment to install Win2K.

- JjP

Did you have Colin Mcrae 2.0 installed by any chance? That game
overwrites a dll that screws up the MS FF wheel and you have to
restore the original file to fix it.

A demo, yes. And BTW if this is a fact, I'm sure the guys at Microsoft
would want to hear it. I have a friend who works at Microsoft Finland,
and she described my problem to the technical guys at work, also
explaining all the different approaches we took to make the wheel work.
All they could say was that we'd gone through all the correct
procedures, and if the wheel wasn't working, there was nothing that
Microsoft could do about it.

- JjP

Oh, it's a fact all right. I emailed Codemasters saying my wheel
wouldn't work after installing CM 2.0 and the guy said he wasn't aware
of such a problem with the game doing that. I posted here about it and
someone posted the fix for me. It's a known problem, don't know about
the demo compared to the full game, but I wouldn't be surprised if
that's what the problem was. I beleive the file the game overwrites is
the HID.dll in the "windows\system" folder.

I wonder if it's only MS Finland who don't know about this, I strongly
suspect MS USA would have asked if I had CMR2 installed... I'll notify
MS Finland so they'll know what to do when some other poor bastard tries
to install MS FF USB on Win98 w/ CMR2.

- JjP

I don't know if MS knows about it, but Codemasters does. And they call
themselves "Genius at Play"? :-)