to eliminate hardware or software as the fault , does the machine boot from that same disk image with a normal floppy drive?

and or , does some totally different type of boot disk work on your floppy emulator?

I've used many of the boot disk images from that site without any problems?
boot622.exe is on your HDD not USB correct?
running it should ask for a floppy, Insert your USB into the gotek and set it to which ever number you want (I use 62 for 6.22, 95 for Win95, etc)
Click ok, it will give a warning about formatting the disk (from memory) and that's it!

If you already have a PC that boots into 6.22 you can chuck the gotek in there and copy the system files over by typing sys c: a:
But you will need to copy across drivers and create config.sys/autoexec.bat files manually

Boot622.exe is on my Hard Drive. Using the USB Floppy Manager software with the USB Stick formatted and inserted into the computer, I choose one of the 100 floppy disk sections within the software and choose write image (or something close to that, i dont have it with me right now). The software prompts me to choose a file. I choose the boot622.exe file and it runs the file and puts the extracted boot disk on the USB stick in whichever floppy number section I choose. If you open the contents of that disk, it shows the boot disk files.

Take the USB stick and put it in the Go-Tek. Boot the system and choose the right number on the Go-Tek. System boots up, but when it starts to read the USB, I get that error about WInImage.

Normal floppy with same image boots fine.

Windows 95 and Windows 98 Boot Disks run fine from the Go-Tek.

That actually rings a bell now
USB Floppy Emulator / Simulator - Video Review
The link to the software is on the previous page.

I wont be in a position to test anytime soon but hopefully this will put you on the right track at least?
I did manage to quicky test boot622.exe on a PC with a gotek, and that worked fine, so its the software that's messing up, not the file

Yea that's not how you create boot disks from that site. They are executables that you need to run with Gotek installed on that machine.

Can Gotek be used to create a Windows 98 Start Up Disk? When prompted during the Win98 installation I put a prep'd and formatted USB stick in there (having followed Phil's tutorial and using UsbFloppyManager1.40i) and select a blank floppy # but I get the following error:

"Disk Initialization Error

Setup cannot properly initialize the disk that you inserted.

Error: Disk sector was not found."

I've tried totally blank 'floppies' as well as ones that I formatted as boot disks with DOS 7.1. Neither work.

as in the actual drive?
That should work fine as far as windows is concerned its just a floppy drive.
I had more luck with 1.23 version of the software, but it is a bit more basic

Yeah I don't get it. I can load floppy disks that I've configured with the utility but I cannot use 'blank disks' for boot disks. Trying to create a boot disk from a game's install.exe yields a blank 'ERROR' as well. It seems like this might only be an issue from DOS. I was able to create a Win 98 Boot Disk from inside Windows.

However, trying to select "Make Boot Floppy" in something like TES: Arena's install.exe just goes to a screen with ERROR in the top left corner.