You may well be right, MS does like to protect us from ourselves these days. Vista will be even worse, of course. I think I'll wait...

Well, in went the new motherboard today.

Previously I copied everything to another pc.

Swapped the MB and soon got Win98 going. After 20 minutes or so of removing drivers and running the new driver disk all was ok win Win98. A similar task and WinXP came good.

Kept getting a screen advice that I had 3 days to reactivate. I held off until all drivers installed and downloads complete. Then chose to reactivate over the Internet and all went though just fine.

The dual boot works perfectly now. Just hope it stays that way after I taken it back and reconnected the printer.

Took over an hour to run SP2 and download all the latest from MS (this pc has not been connected to the Internet for well over a year.