So, I've eventually got my Win98 rig up and working. A coworker heard I was into older machines and graced me with several machines worth of old parts and I was able to put together the following system.

My Win98 rig, v1.0:

Asus p3v133
p3 933/256/133/1.7v s1
512mb pc133
Creative pci512, ct-4790
GeForce 6200 AGP 256mb
HP mx705 17" CRT
HP CD-Writer 8100+
30g/40g HDs, second drive is just kinda sitting in there

So far it's behaved ok. I'll get occasional boot issues. The machine will post and get to the part where it probes the drive controllers and then just kinda hang there. I think it's a cold boot issue, the thing needs to resterted a couple times to fix that.

For some reason, even with the best drivers for the video card and the profile for the monitor, it still gets out of frequency range errors when the machine goes to sleep or when the monitor powers off from energy settings timeouts. I've just set it to never sleep/turn off the monitor and it's all good.

Games-wise, I have some crashes to the desktop here and there. I'm not sure if the machine is too fast for the games I'm trying, or if the geforce is just not the best choice for the games.

Rogue Spear Rainbow Six quits to desktop as soon as the renderer loads.
Outlaws crashes a few seconds into actual gameplay
TIE Fighter collector's CD-Rom will go all fuzzy and colored-lines when coming out of missions to the debreifing when 3d accel is turned on.

I haven't really encountered too many other issues so far. Freelancer will start with a message saying it doesn't recognize my card but GODDAMN if it isn't pretty while playing. All options on and at max, that was a very very well drawn game, despite the voice acting.

So, any ideas about the crashes to the desktop? All games are fully patched and my drivers are all at final releases for the most part. I think the NV drivers are 71.49 or something around there. the 84.xx drivers refused to install, saying win98 wasn't supported.