I experimented today with Sysinternals NTFS for Windows 98, which appeared to be the most "compatible", as it is an interface layer on top of Microsoft NTFS drivers pulled from a compatible Windows installation.

I tried several sets of "driver files", from Windows NT 4.0 SP6, Windows 2000 SP4, and Windows XP SP3. Windows XP was the absolute worst, often blue screening while just sitting at the desktop and definitely when accessing the drive. Windows 2000 was a bit better, but certain operations could cause it to blue screen. The drivers from NT 4 were actually the most stable, but could still crash or blue screen with certain operations. I can't tell you exactly what is causing the instability, but the drivers aren't reliable at all. When the system crashes, the journal gets rolled back and changes made to the disk are not preserved. Something seems to be incomplete, as I never get this much of a journal rollback when crashing from a genuine NT-based operating system.

The software version I used was Sysinternals NTFS Professional 3.0 on Windows ME. The software is branded as for Windows 98, but I don't think that trying to use it on Windows ME was the problem. The NTFS partition was on a logical partition and was tested as formatted from Linux and Windows XP with no change in behavior between the two.

The most reliable thing was being able to access the disk and to read from it. Writing to it is what was inherently unstable. My best guess is that some kind of 16-bit disk access calls aren't being wrapped properly, and this is causing the instability, as the crashes always occur when I'm trying to read and write from a DOS window.