I'd rather not mess with the current install of Win2k that I have (tooke 6 tries to get it installed) but thanks anyways for the iso, I'll use it when I get a new hard drive.

Removed. It's really quite easy to update Windows 2000 since updates can be slipstreamed. Check the RyanVM forums for packs and once integrated then install BlackwingCat Core and Kernel.
I believe BlackwingCat has a HFSLIP script as well but it's not necessary.

If you can't run New Moon 26.5 or K-Meleon 74 on a vanilla Windows 2000 system then eithet the VS C++ redists aren't install or the install is jacked up since both work fine. I recently installed 2000 on my Q9650 last weekend and can verify both work fine.

I can run them fine, but the problems I described happens when going to Vogons.org. NM freezes solid and completely chokes the CPU (other sites work fine) and K-Meleon starts throwing "Script Busy" errors before doing the same thing. In both cases when that happens I have to kill the process or hard reboot the machine.

And yes I tried in a Win2k VM (installed with a known good iso) to see if I could replicate the issue, and for some reason it didn't happen with the VM.

Only things that differed was that the VM had 512MB of RAM (my P3 machine has 256MB of RAM) and had a faster CPU as I don't have any sub-1GHz CPUs beside my P3 laptop and my Pentium 133.

I'm at a total loss here.

Well, I did say that I was at a total loss, right? Out of all possibilities in this world, looks like it started working fine, I do not know what did I do but I think it's working now.

Whenever I load a page on the forums, K-Meleon will hoggle down the CPU (a 800MHz Coppermine Pentium III) at 100% for a few seconds, but if I wait long enough it settles down and becomes usable, it's not ideal but as long it works, I'm okay with that.

Two things that I noticed while trying :

• Scrolling will cause the CPU to spike (if I use the scroll wheel it'll choke down the CPU for ~4 seconds or so) up for a fraction of time, but it's not that big of a problem.
• The post editor buttons seems to be not responding when clicked, so I have to insert the BBCodes manually, and this gets annoying fast (think I'll make a list of the BBCodes used on the forum and jot 'em down on a TXT file so I can copy/paste 'em when needed)

Bonus proof :