says that my download speeds are most of the time better when using 98SE.

Interesting, I'll have to test this out myself when I get a chance.

I should stress test our 98 boxes on the network's 100mbit connection VS XP.

1) NTFS is much safer than FAT32 (w98 can't do NTFS) (altho I find NTFS so much slower than FAT32, I'd rather sit thru a (rare) Scandisk once in a while )

Actually, I've seen several versions of them on the net but there are add-on drivers for windows98 to work with NTFS. Some of the drivers are read-only with such formats but the others are both read & write for NTFS using windows98.

says that my download speeds are most of the time better when using 98SE.

Interesting, I'll have to test this out myself when I get a chance.

I should stress test our 98 boxes on the network's 100mbit connection VS XP.

If you take the time to stress test different environments, make sure to tweak internet settings first, so you can perform proper comparison with same/similar (IP)MTU, RCW, TTL, DACKs, PMTUD etc.

Most necessary tools are here:

http://www.mdgx.com/toy.htm#MTU

if you prefer to do this the easy way.

If you prefer to do this the "hard way" by using regedit and/or REG files, these pages may help:

http://www.mdgx.com/modem.htm#MY

Hope this helps.