WIN98 2nd edition or not?

[systempat]

I want a little advice from those of you that have been thru this. Current systems are both on Win98 original (FE for reference). The new system, which is a pent3-700 on an ABIT bx-133 mobo, is having problems after installs of software and a soundcard. The software install was IE5 from a company-licensed disk where I work. After install it completely screwed up Windows. It would get an error out of Explorer.exe before finishing loading the desktop, leaving me with wallpaper with no icons, no toolbar, nothing to click on.
Talked to one of the support guys at work and he blamed it on Win98 FE. Said it had a number of problems solved in 98SE. Also said having Norton utilities installed can interfere with things. I have the Norton 3.0 version installed but I disable all the run-time parts except for crashguard. Not sure if he's BS-ing me or not.

I hate to give Bill Gates and co. another 80 bucks for something that should have been a bug-fix service patch if that's the case.
By the way the way I got out of the screwed-up desktop was to re-install Win98. On top of the existing data in the HD, not a clean install. This worked fine and took it back to IE4. I had tried Scanreg /restore from a DOS boot and it didn't make any difference.

[Edited by systempat on 02-07-2001 at 12:04 PM]

[sedu]

Get rid of Crashguard. There is a 90% probability that this is the cause of your problems. I have found that 98FE and 98SE are both stable systems when patched and updated and I have run both in ways that most people never get to try i.e. swapping between four different drives in a laptop that is docked and undocked constantly.

[systempat]

Ummmm, OK. Crashguard goes.
At this point with the re-install it's running without any updates (Msoft updates) that I might have had. Have to see if they are still in my download area