I had problems with Win98SE crashing all the time, so I installed Win2k Pro.

Win2K Pro is the most stable OS Microsoft has yet released. Now, instead of crashing once or twice a day, or more, Win2K Pro may crash once a week or less. But, it does do what appears to do a "phantom reboot" every once in a while -- almost identical to what Michelle experiences with Win98SE.

The app that crashes the most on my Win2K installation is IE 5.0. It leaves a msg about memory address problem and you have to click a button to close the msg. If you don't reboot right then you will eventually get the 'blue screen' of death... believe it or not. Well, not actually that screen, it just looks like it. What happens is that the icons on the desktop start going away (memory is being eaten up) and eventually the taskbar goes away. Only my blue background is left. Nothing works except cntl-alt-del, from which you can reboot.

A couple of days ago, to eliminate that pesky problem, the tech support here did a Win2K service pack 2 install from the Microsoft website. It went very smoothly, except that when we rebooted, W2K asked for the W2K CD, which we supplied. It refused to recognize it's own install CD, so we have to click the cancel buttons on those annoying "verifying state of orginal files..." messages. We tried to install the IE 5. upgrade from Microsoft's website, but it said the previous service pack installation didn't complete. Duh! Even uninstalling the service pack didn't work. The "verifying..." msg is now another annoying problem with W2K. The techie didn't have any problems when he used a CD to install the W2K service pack 2 on other W2K installations. I was the Internet lab rat. It looks like I am looking at a scratch install of W2K again. That will shoot an entire day, when you have to load the other software and restore your archive files. But, I am satisfied with the stability of W2K so I know once it is reinstalled and service pack 2 and IE are installed off a CD right away that it will be a very usable platform.
I don't think you could go wrong with it, Michelle.

(It was this crashing nonsense that drove me from Win95 to Linux in 1997. I haven't had a crash of my home PC since I started running SuSE on it in September of 1997. I haven't had WinXX on it since January 1, 2000.)