When win98 starts up, i get the wallpaper, then i get an error that says explorer has performed a stack dump and nothing else opens. I do not get the start button or anything else on my screen. How do I resolve this error problem? I have reinstalled win98 and still have the same problem. All help is very much appreciated.

Weird, but I guess I would start testing other things and run only the basic stuff to run the computer, ram, hdd, video, cdrom, make sure the chip isnt overclocked, double check your bios, make sure you have PNP OS to NO, make sure your cpu fan is spinning as easy as that sounds Ive seen windows give a ton of weird errors on install when the fan wasnt working properly. Then I would run fdisk, delete the partition, make a new one, format, run fdisk /mbr then try to reinstall again. Maybe some of this will help.

You "overinstalled" or formatted and reinstalled. If it was the former, than the error could be caused by one of your startups. Try booting to safe mode. If this is ok, run msconfig and unselect everything except systray and scanreg and reboot. If this is ok, add back one at a time until you get the failure again.