Mostly agree with the above, Win2k was loved as it was a vast improvement over NT4, but was always aimed at for business, for best results stick with Intel.
WinME only slight improvement over 98SE, and lost a lot of legacy features like DOS Mode out of the box and older hardware without driver support, Important for home market.

What I was REALLY surprised with was how many games did work in Win2k a few years back. I don't know if compatibility got better or I remember wrong from when I was young, but only about 5 games in my collection don't like 2K
I never found 9x that unstable on a BX based motherboard, but have to admit 2K is much better behaved over all on the same system