heh been us'n Omega Catalyst's since the 9700 Pro never had probs there, us'n 2K back then & XP Pro from the X800XT PE AGP but yeaps under 98SE they suck deeply since 98SE isn't that reliable as stable, I woluld always prefer 2000 Pro/XP Pro above everything, just much more reliable..
Oh well it all depeds on what you need and what your preferences are
If you run very old programs very few need 98SE but miost can run under XP Pro under 98SE compabillity mode or under 2000 Pro/XP Pro under Dos Box
I find the Forcewhere of the geforces suck deeply actually, NV just can't make stable as good drivers that give good image quallity as Omega/ATi.AMD can that's under 2K as XP only
NV & 3dfx were once king at mak'n drivers for Linux & Win9.xx, as today NV makes solid drivers for Linux as ATI.AMD has improved though still lot's of fixes to go.
Here a list of the many major problesm with NV drivers hehe
http://www.google.nl/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&...Sh*t on both sides man.
Still prefer 3dfx cards since they work perfectly in ANY OS
But if you're a Linux man just use a Voodoo3/4/5 based card or a GeForce 3,4, FX, 6, 7 through 8 series they should do well enough, the best forcewhere drive I have used for 2K + XP was 84.21 WHQL, the sucked big time, their ForceWare 90.xx series layout was worse than the 80.xx ones so overdone :')
What I reckon is that your system is instable with ATi cards, I had similar things with my EPoX EP-8K5A2+ motherboard while playing RedAlert2 on the 5500 as ATi X800 XT PE as the GeForce4 Ti 4600 Ultra, all three had troubles with Red Alert2, while playing it it crashed after playing for not even 3 muinutes.
all other games ran fine, now this is weird. on the ASUS A7R333-R Rev.1.02 with all three cards, ASUS A8R32MVP Deluxe with CrossFire setup as 5500 PCI no probs as Dell Inspiron 9100 xTreme with M18 MR 9800 also no probs.
so my problem was amotherboard deciding me what to run and what not, while the 8K3A+ had no troubles the 8K5A2+ did since I had 2 of these one was new the other was second hand and both had the same troubles.
for the 6000 these are good boards for 3dfx games no troubles there, it's that Red Alert2 is a main game still being played here so everysystem has to quillify with that game hehe