>You mentioned that some fonts need to be present otherwise the machine will fail to reboot. Considering the fact that I'm using a clean install including Multi-Language support I fail to understand why it does not work on the W98SE machine. Any suggestions to what I'm missing.

Wow. It's been some time, really.

The last time I had this sort of trouble was with W95 OSR2, and it started working once I made sure all the necessary *.nls files were in place, and the .fon files supported the needed codepages. I think it's the system.fon, serife.fon and a couple of others. The versions which support 1250 exist somewhere in the setup, but it's hard to tell which are which. I remember I had one of PowerToys for W95, which added a couple of pages to font property sheet, so when you rightclicked a font file to see its properties, it also showed you the supported codepages.

I'm actually experiencing similar symptoms on 2000 - a couple of icons on login dialogs during the login show up as blurred squares at a 45 deg angle, and there's some text missing. But at least it works. Under 95 (and it seems the behavior extends to 98SE) it showed me some of these dialogs in an unreadable font, oversized, and the only way was to boot to DOS, regedit 1252.reg, reboot (i.e. if you recall, "save the registry setting first" - this is what you can use instead of reinstalling Windows).

HTH
Dragan