XP really is more stable. It will boot faster, and you'll have better driver support, and better MS support... 98 phone support and much of the rest of support is scheduled to go offline in less than 30 DAYS, paid incident support goes offline in six months, etc. Don't expect to find any new hardware in 2005 for windows 98, and don't expect to be able to connect to the internet safely after MS stops releasing updates.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lif...onsumer.mspx#6