Thanks for your replies and ideas. I tried the "create a new folder and install to it" as described by several of you, Sailor Steve in particular, but in each of the 3 or 4 attempts I still got the message "1628: Failed to complete installation" at the final stage of the install.
I then tried Pedalboat's idea, as I thought I had nothing to loose. I had a freshly installed working version on an WXP OS machine. I made sure that it was patched to 1.4b & GWX 3.0 Gold updated. I simply copied the "Silent Hunter" folder contents to the new folder that I had created on the W8.1 machine (C:\SH3) and rebooted it. I then attempted to run the SH3.exe but this time I got the disc check warning that SH3 was designed to run on W95, 98SE etc. (i.e. not W8.1) so it would not start up. The solution was to copy the 5 files from the "No Disc" patch that I had so that it would ignore the disc. It then fired up for the first time. I then installed SH3 Commander, added some more mod's, ran JSGME and started the game from SH3 Commander successfully.
I hope that this may help others that may have difficulties in SH3 installation after following the instructions that seem to work for many others.
"There is a solution to every problem, the fun is finding it!"
Thanks, again.
Prof M
