I have never used 98 me as i bypassed it, and even 2000 i bypassed, though i have never had a problem with my old system, with home, pro and 98 on used a boot disk make a 3 boot at start.
Just check you 2000 but you should have no probs but as i have never used 2000 and only new 1 other person who used it.
But ive never had probs with pointing to external runtimes when needed load into oser and vue, and like 98 me and 2000, vista is a stop gap system till vienna is realesed.
You have to be carefull with microsoft so called support of systems they replace as like old systems, it was the anti virus houses that kept supporting older windows for as long as they could.
I like a  lot of people world wide dont trust what microsoft say's after all they still keep realesing every so often an auto update that screws ya comp up, then week later they realese patch to fix previous patch.
Last time was a doosey the update took out the sound drivers on some motherboard's and they had realese a fix to put i right.