In short, stick with XP for Morrowind, and use 98 fr the better old-school games <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" />
Your analysis of Win98 is spot on; hell, I used to do extensive memory management pieces on DOS and Win98. (Remember QEMM? I loved tweaking that thing.) I still use Memokit to free RAM in Win98, though Mandrake's suggestion about Cacheman might be better for games.
In any case, I think Tiffin may have been onto something. I did a vanilla install of MW and its two addons, and two out of two times, the game crashed on me during the Seyda Neen registration process. I haven't played many games, but it has also happened in Sacred and <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/beyond.gif" alt="" /> . I'm now thinking that there's something seriously wrong with my XP setup. The drivers are uptodate, but something else is messed up.
I'm writing this from the Win98 side of my 98/XP system. I've done a clean install again, walked through, and had no problems at all. Yes, I have no doubt it will be slower to load areas--I don't think Win98 can really use 256 MB RAM effectively. But. It's. Stable. If I hold off on the visual eyecandy, like MW Texture Pack, I think I'll be alright.
I'm still considering Landscape Remix, which Mandrake suggested, or Brash's Land Textures. Has anybody taken a look at these, for comparison? I'm just curious whether we're talking 512x512 with either, or still less. The Texture Pack is 1026x1026, and that explains why my memory was probably spooling to the hard drive.
