Win XP upgrade from 98 freezes

I'm not sure if I should be posting this here or in the XP forum.

I've been having problems with Win98, particularly kernel32.dll, and I thought
now would be a good time to upgrade to XP. Install a new operating system and
get around the freeze-ups and abends I've been having.

I put in the disk and all went well until the upgrade got to the point where it
claimed 80 minutes remained to install the upgrade in the "checking system"
step, the one right before it really installs XP. And there it sat for 2 hours.
I shut it down, started it up again and bypassed all the system compatibility
checks and whatnot to get right to it. I then got a message "Fatal error
Cannot create temporary folder. Setup cannot continue." It needs 1.553 GB to
load and I have 2.08 GB open on the disk, so that's not the issue.

I've had no luck searching on MS for this problem, and trying to contact their
support makes my Internet Explorer turn into Internet Exploder, i.e. it abends
and shuts down. I would download their compatibility check software, but it's
50 meg and I'm on a 56K line, so that would take the next thing to forever.

Anyone got a quick solution to this? I have not installed any updates for 98,
which I probably should do. I also tried to defrag the disk last week and that
didn't finish either, so what the heck do I do now? I suppose a clean
re-install of 98 would help, but I don't have a disk for it. I dug this
computer out of the trash and resurrected it, and I assume I have a legit copy
of 98 on it.

Help! (Again)


Jay

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