So, the rubber on the outside of the cables just rot? Just like that, just from being stored?

Yes, all the cables from my RCX 1.0 and RCX 2.0 were stored together. There were different levels of degradation, some just had a strange touch while others had parts where the copper was exposed and the plastic insulation was laying there in small crumbs. Everything was in a typical plastic sorting box, closed and in a closet. All the rubberbads were ok however.

OK that is just weird.

OK i now have a problem. The order was sent 2 weeks ago on the 19th but still hasn't arrived. This is wrong since envelope should not take that long. Unfortunately packages sent by envelope does not have tracking. I thought about contacting the store but at the time their customer service was closed for the weekend. Now i feel that there is no point. It has left them so they can't really do anything. I could contact the swedish postal service but with nothing more than a order number i don't think they can do much either. So for now i'm just gonna wait and hope that it simply has taken a detour somewhere and will soon turn up.

I really hate not thinking about this when i ordered 9398 a few weeks ago. Not only does Conrad have a really cheap adapter but they also only needed 5 days to send it too me. Sure that was schenker i think not the postal service but still. When i ordered vitamin D from another store i got that envelope the day after and i made the order after lunch so mail can be really fast when it wants to. BTW the box that held the 9398 box could easily have had 2 in it so it was really big. Something i noticed all to well bringing it on a bus. If only i had a car.

Even though the store might not be able to do something about it, I would definitely give them a call and explain the situation.

Mail sent asking what to do. Hopefully a answer wont take long. I got the mail for today but this wasn't in it.

OK the store was really fast to respond with a mail saying that if that was the case then they would send a new one and included an address asking if it was accurate. It was so i told them that and got another mail saying that a new one is sent. Hopefully it will work this time.

Getting in contact is useful most of the time

It sure is.

At this point I am not sure your RCX will ever work, fate is against you! Just get the new mindstorms and put an end to this oddyssey

Unfortunately i can't afford it at the moment and seeing how extremely little i have used it lately i think it would be better to simply forget about it. Yeah the though that despite all of this i still haven't programmed anything, let alone tried to run it is worrying. Hopefully nothing out of the ordinary will happen when i get to that stage.

I realize this response is about 9 years late but I just wanted to provide some information that might be helpful.  I dug out my old 1.0 RIS Mindstorm sets a couple months ago and tried resurrecting them.  My goal was to get all stock LEGO software and programming environments working.  Yes, I know BRICX is there and supports most modern 64bit OS systems but I found it was lacking when it came to support for the expansion sets like Vision Command (#9731) set - more on this set later. 

As far as getting the RIS core software working on my Win 10 / 11 64 bit machines, I simply created a WinXP 32 bit virtual machine in Oracle VirtualBox, installed the latest RIS 2.0 software on the VM, and used my RIS 1.0 set's serial IR tower with a USB to serial adapter to communicate with the RCX.  As far as my testing went, this went extraordinarily well and everything worked just as if it were running on a physical Win98/XP 32 bit machine from the time period this product was released.  I would say for most people who simply want to use the RCX, the original software, and expansion set software other than vision command, this solution will solve 99% of your issues.

Unfortunately, the Vision Command expansion set was an entirely different story.  Working with the smart camera presented numerous issues.  First, my VC kit came with a software package designed for Windows 98 and I believe this release was essentially 1.0 for the product.  I found it incredibly buggy on both Win 98 and Win XP 32 bit VMs...so buggy that I basically gave up on trying to use the software.  I found a number of Vision Command Win XP .iso files but they were in numerous languages other than English (French, German, Dutch, etc).  I reached out to Lego customer support and explained this scenario and asked if they happened to have a copy of the WinXP software in English they could provide.  My hope was that someone on their engineering team would dig up a copy from a desk drawer or an old server drive and turn it over.  Instead, I got a canned response telling me the product was essentially retired...kind of a sad response but not surprising given Lego is essentially giving up on Mindstorms all together after 25 years.  Based on this response, I installed the French version of the software on my Win XP VM and it showed a significant improvement in bugs but left me with 2 large issues...1) I don't speak French and 2) the USB camera would intermittently work, freeze, and eventually crash the software.  After some research it appears that the USB pass through for Virtual Box significantly slows down USB data rates which explained the slow, intermittent performance of the camera.  With this discovery, I abandoned using a VM, dug out a 20 year old Windows XP 32 bit laptop, and spent hours getting the laptop back up and running.  I reset up the French version of Vision Command WinXP on the machine and noticed significant improvement of the camera performance running natively on a real WinXP pc versus its performance on a WinXP VM.  With this data, I went ahead and recore loaded a more "modern" win 7 laptop I had with a 32 bit version of Win 7 and got everything running just as I had on my older Win XP laptop.  At this point, the only problem left to solve was the language issue.  After a lot of poking around the backend install files, I found that grabbing the data folders from the English Win 98 version of VC and pasting the files in those folders over the equivalent data files for the French Win XP version of the installed software translated nearly all of the core software's menu screens, mission descriptions, video files, and audio files. The initial launch menu and various software error messages were still in French, but nearly all of the user interfaces were updated to English to the point the language barrier was essentially a non-issue.

So long story short, with a lot of trial and error, it is possible to get your original Mindstorms set working along with the expansion sets including Vision Command.  I am not sure you average end user will go to these lengths but it is possible.