So far I've had no real problems with ME as compared to 98, meaning both preform about the same for me. Then again I turned off system restore right off the bat, installed firefox, winamp, and avg before ever hooking my modem in.

To answer the question stated in the first post ME has one advantage, MAYBE two depending on how lazy you are.

It boots faster(although without a realtime dos enviroment a fair number of older apps don't work).

It comes with windows movie maker(which i have yet to see a download for that is NOT for xp...which irritates me to no end, given my compute'rs specs xp would hog rescources to no end). Granted this probably isn't an issue since I know there are some really good move making/editing apps that work with the 9x line(though 9x support seems to be phasing out amongst software companies).