I've had this old ITOX Tiger Star Industrial 486 for a while and have tinkered with it now and then. It has handled DOS and WIndows 3.11 without issue.
However, I have not been successful in getting Windows 95 or 98 SE running smoothly on it.

(I know it's not a 98 SE era box, I'm not expecting it to perform top notch, just want options)

Essentially any version of Windows 9x I have tried results in inconsistent (but regular) invalid page faults, often (but not always) initiated by Explorer.exe, always in different DLL, and almost always upon signing into the system.

I have a CF Card adapter in it, and DOS and Windows 3.1 work from that without issue. Initially I had tried running 9x off the CF card and hit the above issues. I thought initially that 9x may just not like the CF card, so I installed a 6GB spinner, and installed it there, same issues. I thought it might be the memory, so I picked up a couple of other sticks for cheap. . . same issues.

So that brings me to now, I had kept attributing it to a hardware issue (and it may still be that), but what I stumbled on was that loading the current installation of WIN98SE on the spinner in Safe Mode. . . runs smooth as butter.

So, what's the right process for eliminating potential causes in normal mode? This is a fresh installation, at most all I've done so far is install drivers for the graphics card. . . Any ideas of what to try turning off in WIndows to see if I can get it stable in normal mode, and then walk back?

Thanks