I agree with all those who recommend 2000 (or XP). I use 2k at home and work, and have only a few hangups a week (mostly with microsoft products....believe it or not) You might check your drivers and consider doing a quick re-install of windows if you must stay with 98 (just pop the CD in and start the install). Exceptions generally mean that something did something really bad. If poser was doing this directly, those who are using non NT machines would be reporting core dumps and other types of errors. Most likely, a dll is out of date, or corrupted. Frankly, for the $150, you really can't find a better upgrade (unless you have hardware that doesn't work) I think TigerDirect had OEM win2k for sale for about that much. Not sure how easy it is to find it anymore (but you don't have to worry about MS spying on you, nor the registration limit, etc that comes with XP) eric