Paugie, I reckon your best bet is dual systems. Now, before you start shouting and throwing your toys out of the pram, I'm not talking big $$$ here. You don't need an extra monitor or a whole heap of hardware, just an old system - a P III with 256MB or a K6 will run Win98 smooth as fish poo. You probably have enough old bits floating around to make most of the unit already, and can scrounge whatever is missing without too much heartbreak.
The secret ingredient is a KVM. Now until a few years back, a KVM would cost you serious $$$, especially if you wanted one that actually worked most of the time, and you needed a whole stack of $10 custom cables and gender adaptors too - added up to US$20 or $40 just for cables. But these days you can get a tiny little two-port KVM for about US$25. No moving parts, just press scroll lock twice to swap systems. You can share keyboard, mouse, monitor and just have an extra tower. Add a network card and a $2 ethernet cable, and you have the two machines connected, sharing drives, and the whole system purring along like butter.
