I'm running Win98SE on a home brew system with a Athelon 2000XP
chip,GeForce2 video card 512mb of DDR, 1 120GB HDD and another 20GB
HDD.
I'm having constant problems with Windows Explorer (not IE) siezing
up, hanging, generating BSODs etc.  It starts this when doing I/O
operations in any quanitiy especially deletes (seems to be related to
the number of files involved--but I can't be sure).  Windows will run
real slow--not shutting windows or showing files as moved or deleted. 
The problem gets progressivly worse until the whole OS siezes up or I
get a BSOD. A reboot will fix the problem for a while.
M$ Tech support says this is because WIN98 doesn't support large
partitians so I devided the disc into 4 partitians which should be
small enough but it still does this crap (on all 4 partitians BTW)
Please don't tell me to upgrade to XP, I already heard that from M$. 
I'm looking for a cheaper and less drastic solution (I still don't
trust XP).

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Request for Question Clarification by bio-ga on 01 Sep 2003 12:58 PDT

- What is the mainboard chipset?

- Are you using a virus scanner? If yes, did you try disabling it for a while?

- Are you sure you don't have any kind of adware/spyware/virus in your system?

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Clarification of Question by basesurge-ga on 01 Sep 2003 13:43 PDT

Knew I forgot something:
Board: VT8366-8233 (jaystar)
Bus Clock: 133 megahertz
BIOS: Award Software International, Inc. 6.00 PG 11/22/2002

Running Norton AV 2003.  Norton says no viruses.  Ad-Aware says no
spyware.
Don't like running without a virus scanner on (I would have to do it
full time, this problem is constant).

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Clarification of Question by basesurge-ga on 16 Sep 2003 20:45 PDT

In case anyone out there is monitoring this I thought I'd post an
update.

I tried everything everyone said and...short story...do dice...oh
well.

However I did come up with a work-around on my own...our old friend
DOS.  Doing all those moves/deletes in DOS seems to cause no problem. 
I guess DOS isn't smart enough to care about partitian size...<shrug> 
I will have to upgrade sometime (probably soon) but this will do for
now.  Thanks for all your help.

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Clarification of Question by basesurge-ga on 17 Sep 2003 03:05 PDT

Thanks to feilong-ga 

This stop-gap (The DOS thing) will do for now.    Just out of
curiosity, does anyone have any idea why this [feces] heppens?

My guess is a bad RAM chip.. But, these types of probablems are
impossible to diagnose over Google Answers (IMHO). See if replacing
the RAM fixes the problem.. BTW, XP is actually not that bad--this
from a real Linux Guru that dispises everything MS.

Another bad RAM stick--sigh.  Thanks.

boot into safe boot and delete extra things from device manager.
enable SMART for your disk drives in your bios settings.
swap out/in ram modules.
upgrade to win2000, or even winxp -- bad stories when it came out but
they've had time enough to work out the worst bugs.

Haha.  You GA kids are cute. =)

If you suspect bad ram, *test it*.  Don't just tell him to buy a new
one. ;)
http://www.memtest86.com
"Memtest86 is thorough, stand alone memory test for x86 architecture
computers."

And, anyway, deleting files is not memory intensive, so I don't
suspect bad ram.  (Doesn't mean that you shouldn't test your ram,
basesurge.)

I would suspect norton antivirus.  Disable/remove it.  Then delete
some files.. Still have the mass-deletion-causes-slow-down problem?

.. Yeah?  Ok, try this.  .. And, I'm not sure about this, it's just a
feeling that I have..  Go into system properties, performance tab. 
Hit the filesystem button, and set "Typical role of this computer" to
"desktop", not "network server".  .. This setting controls the
filesystem/harddisk cache in some way.  My computer does seem to have
slightly better performance when deleting large numbers of files, when
set to desktop.  Your mileage my vary.  Also, maybe yours is already
set to desktop, since that is the default. =)

MS Tech support is probably right.  This problem never happened to me
in the old days, days when I had smaller hard drives.  It's definately
some sort of limitation in win98. =(

Hope this helps.

I've noticed this problem a long time ago. I believe that it is not
caused by defective RAM or Norton Antivirus. Why? Try deleting large
amounts of data in safe mode where NAV or any other antivirus or TSR
programs are totally disabled and you'll still get the same result
even with a brand new RAM. But try to delete large amounts of data in
normal Windows mode using MS-DOS prompt with all the TSR programs and
Norton Antivirus and you won't experience that slowdown problem. This
problem also occurs in Win95. I've been using MS-DOS prompt for
deleting large files in Windows since I first used Win95. Another
workaround I use is ACDSee.

MS Tech support is correct. It is a limitation of Win9x system. It's
weird that deleting large files via Windows system integrated
applications produces this problem which I personally call as "RAM
choke". In this case, system hang and BSOD happens when too much data
is deleted.

You can try a few of these tricks below

click start run: Msconfig, Click system.ini, double click , 386enh,
Click new and type in ConservativeSwapFileUsage click apply.
Then click new again, type in IRQ[10]=4096 Do the same through irq12

Then click new type  MinPagingFileSize=2095104
                     MaxPagingFileSize=2095104
                     MaxPhysPage=1FFFF
Your problem is with memory management not the chip itself. I have had
the problem before.  Check your start-up services. MSCONFIG- Startup
tab. Uncheck everything you really don't need running.
After all that, you can click run-regedit
Then click hkey_local_machine\system\current control set\session
manager\memory manager. Look to your right and change the following
IoPageLockLimit to 4096 (decimal) NOT HEX! Change LargSysteCache to
1(Decimal) If neither of these are present create right click then new
Dword. While under session manger scroll up on the left side until you
see control right click then new key. Type  Priority control. Now on
the left creat the following Dwords Priority control Then double click
it and type 1 (decimal)
Then close regedit. Right click my computer icon. Go to performance
file system, change typical role of computer to network server.
Hopefully these changes should fix your lock-up and bsod problems :)

The FAT32 filesystem was not really designed for 120 GB hard disks. 
The data structures can go bad even on a 7 GB partition, as I have
learned to my cost.  Ever tried a defrag on a big partition?  Life is
too short!  Moral:  use another operating system for big hard disks. 
By the way, if it works in DOS this suggests something wrong with the
Windows 32 bit drivers.  I too used to suffer from system stall when I
deleted a large file from Win98, but now I'm using XP at work and this
has its own set of problems...

You could always try another source of Operating System, i.e. Open
Source...

Ignore this dis-information.
>>The FAT32 filesystem was not really designed for 120 GB

The FAT32 was designed to work on HDDs up to 2 Terrabytes and
theoretically up to 8TB.
I have personally formatted a proper RAID'ed server and was able to
get over 1TB formatted in FAT32.  The Windows 98se Operating System
software is separate from the "File Allocation Table" hard drive
formatting system and many of it's applications give incorrect numbers
for the size of and amount of free space on such a large Hard drive.
Some Win98 software will just freeze up on a super large HDD, but I've
not experianced any difficulties with 80GB or 160GB FAT32 PCs and yes
they mult-boot and WinXP likes the FAT32 60GB partition on the 160GB
PC.

The trick to large HDD Partitioning and Formatting, Win98se's FDISK on
a bootable floppy disk.

Good Luck and try not to upgrade Windows, just delete it and install
fresh, you'll avoid problems like the ones you've mentioned.

Your friendly neighborhood PC Tech

Well obviously the first thing would be to advise you to upgrade - not
to XP as its a piece of junk and buggy, Win2k is the most stable with
all the service packs. Should be able to get it cheaply on eBay.
Also, are you overclocking your system? If you are, change it to the
clocked speed and see if that stops your BSODs.
Might also want to consider flashing the BIOS on your motherboard to
the latest version.

I'm kind of suprised to see this question still posted.  I thought
they took them down after 6 months or something...<shrug>.  Anyway--an
update.
I have turned of DMA on both of my HDDs and this helps a lot but it
still does it from time to time.  And I'm not overclocking...that
scares me...I don't have money to but new MOBOs/CPUs all the time. 
Thanks to everyone who posted answers.