John, most of this is just to do with using Win98 and any other Win OS (only 3.11, 95 and 98SE at home) I use but can we summarise the following?

Windows, although it has made improvements in later releases has tended to have failings in its own internal memory handling.

These problems are compounded by poor application programming (which most likely means a specific program causes a problem doing something) and some, argaubly the most severe resource issuses are likely to at least involve failures at application programming level (even if that program may be MS Word).

Applications may use disk space, typically in the temp directory to create "working files" and "backups" and that these files are not always deleted, particularly when the system crashes.

The OS itself maintains a swap area of its own to move contents from hardware memory to disk to enble the system to use more (at times significantly more) memory than the system has availible in hardware memory and that this area may require a contigious space on the hard disk.

That probably the most important issue in all of the above as far as a user is concerned is to perform regular system maintainence, i.e. clear out unwanted files and to defrag the hard disk(s).

Jon