If Adam's main problem is that the clock gets
messed up in "suspend" mode, then another
less elegant solution is to get rid of
suspend mode. If I'm doing something
that must not be interrupted, like burning
a data CD ROM, I classify "suspend" as being
much like screen savers, more naughty
than nice if you burn CDs.

Does the software shut down actually
(well, mostly) power off the computer?
(Isn't that the "bare bones" of APM?)
Is this part actually NOT working?

Sure, the power management that powers down
the hard disk, etc. might be nice for
some applications...

It sounds like Adam has two boot partitions,
and one boots with APM and the other boots
without it. How could two installs of W98
from the very same install CD disk on the
very same machine give you such differences?
(Was APM disabled in BIOS for 2nd install?)

Were you trying to create a clean boot
with a relatively clean registry, or
did you consider CLONING the drive/partition?

I'm not pretending I have all the answers
but I hope my questions help lead to a
resolution.

I would tend to not discard Shep's idea
that Advanced Power Management is best
done by being detected during a full
windows install. If you really do find
a convenient way around that, I'd suspect
that Shep would be as glad as anybody
to learn a new trick.

Why you're getting two different installs
using two different drives(partitions)
on the very same system is a point to ponder.