I installed Wengier's MS-DOS 7.1 on my vielle 486 DX4 clone, which was running Windows 98 Micro.

Since then, I added line to somewhere in the middle of autoexec.bat (before mouse driver, lfn drivers, etc.) to load Windows ( "win").

Now my machine takes at least 4x more time to boot up! From relative quick to ungainly slow.

maybe I am in need of some defragging? I've been too busy with other projects to bother with the machine (Three Thinkpads to build, a PS/2 and another 486 with NT4, not to mention my truck...)

900t,

So you mean MS-DOS 7.10 was installed successfully, but only your Win98 GUI boot up (by using "WIN" command) is slowed down? Is EMM386.EXE and/or some drivers loaded in CONFIG.SYS? EMM386.EXE or similar is very useful to many DOS programs, so it's loaded automatically when you installed MS-DOS 7.10 if you choose to load it (which is the default setting). However, EMM386 or similar could slow down some programs. Remove or comment out the reference to EMM386.EXE or similar in CONFIG.SYS, and try again.

If you want some defragging, that's fine. Windows 98's DEFRAG supports both FAT32 and Long File Names (LFN), so it's a good defrag tool.