When I attempt to run some of my old (very old) software that requires a dos enviornment from windows 98, I lose all mouse function, sound card usage, and the graphics suggest an amazing lack of memory. In windows I can see that my config.sys and autoexec.bat are empty, knowing no more than that there really ought to be something in those files, but not knowing what to do about it has left me at an impasse. How do I get my old games to work?

Some programs simply can't be run from Windows. This may or may not be the case, but the easiest way is often to run it from MS-DOS mode. Restart the computer in DOS mode (or press F8 and select MS-DOS prompt only from the menu), and run the program from there. If you are not familar with the DOS commands for executing programs, you can do a .pif file which does it for you. Right-click on the exe/com file you are trying to execute, select Properties, click Advanced, check the box for "MS-DOS mode".
Seeing that you don't have anything at all in config.sys or autoexec.bat may cause the program not to work anyway, in case it needs a mouse driver or something like that in order to work. It is of course very hard to predict what sort of problems you will get then, you will have to run the program and post another message here with a description of the error messages it produces, and then you could get help with how what to put in your configuration files.
If you don't get it to work anyway, if it just crashes your computer, you should consider downloading a DOS 6.22 boot diskette, boot from it and run the game from there.

Now, if you would like more specific help, it would help everyone a lot if you told us what application you are trying to run, what it is supposed to do, and what it's system requirements are.

Some dos games require some extra
conventional memory. Open up config.sys.
From there, type in:
dos=high,umb
device=c:\windows\himem.sys
device=c:\windows\emm386.exe

If that exists, then go into dos to play the
game if you have dos sound drivers, or a
mouse drive