"Gary S. Terhune" wrote:

Win98SE which has DUN and did have a NIC showing in Safe Mode
though it's not onboard and must have been removed some time
ago. Installed Linksys NIC (10/100/1000 Model EG1032, v3),

I've had startup problems with Win-98 and one particular brand of
gigabit NIC's (offhand don't remember the brand).

Problem was that I had set the NIC to 8k jumbo frame size - Win98
didn't like that. When changed to 4k, it booted and worked fine.