A sometimes troublesome setting, that could be in your old dialup connection setup, is an "always use this connection" option in the setup of the dial-up number.

There is also a setting in IE, and possibly in your other browsers, at Tools|Options at the Connections tab that let you specify a default connection for the browser.

If the "always use" choice was set for the old connection, or if a default connection is set for your browser, when your browser opens it may try to connect to the old number but will fail since the line is already connected to the new one. If the old connection is already made of course everything works.

Even with a default connection set in the browser, it should use an existing connection without trying to re-connect, but I'm not sure whether that can be guaranteed. The new connection setup wizard should add the new connection to your browser automatically, but that's another "can't guarantee" thing. You might need to manually add the new connection in the browser to tell the browser that it's a good one to use if open.

A new ICS provider is always suspect. There are numerous Microsoft Knowledge Base articles with titles like "xxx stops working when you use AOL" or "AOL stops working when you xxxx." Yahoo follows closely in number of articles. Other less popular services may have similar problems but just aren't "big enough" to get articles written. If you can browse to the service's web site, you may find something in their FAQ or Help files.

I don't find anything that says simply whether you can get updates that you'd need if you reinstall Win98SE. It's been obsolete so long that they don't even mention it at the update sites any more. The only suggestion I can make would be that before you do a reinstall you might want to visit whatever update site you've been using, or the Microsoft Update site and see if they'll tell you. At that site, they automatically launch, or try to launch, a search for updates you need, and only seem to offer info on the OS version they find on your machine. If you go in with Win98SE installed they may tell you what you can get, or what other site you should go to.

IFF the scan completes successfully, there usually is an option to "review update history" that might give you a list of updates that have been installed on your machine. Most of them should be identified by a KB article number that you could use to try to get them individually if you find that there isn't an automated update still available.

Quite a few updates incorporate or supercede prior updates, so getting a fresh install up to speed may not involve getting every update you've downloaded in the past; but I can't find anything on how many you'd need now to get a new install up to date.

IFF you can get the updates, you may be able to save during download so you can install manually later. You might be able to save all the "install" files (if you have to get them again) so that you'd have them for future use; but some of them have to be installed in the order issued so you'd need to do some careful record keeping.

For current OS versions, there are downloadable "CD format" files including all current patches, that Sys Admins can get for updating their fleets of computers, but the current CD for WinXP is right at 800 MB and my current connection won't handle it (in my remaining lifetime).

John