Thanks to Gape's 'unofficial' Service Packs and MDGx's W98SE2ME patches the Win98SE system itself can be updated and even improved upon.
However, more and more of the programme makers are dropping Win98SE-compatability from updated versions of their software.
This makes it important to preserve older, compatible versions of these programmes. I would suggest that there is need for a permanent 'repository' for these older versions. 'Witts End Oldies', 'Silly Dog', and 'Old Version' host many of these earlier versions but they are of course limited and we need a more comprehensive repository. Perhaps the necessary bandwidth to accomodate all this could be by using peer-to-peer or torrent?

for some compability i sad have to say win9x is not the best to support compability on new hardware (remember restart each time you attach a new hardware?) and no default usb support (you can download a native usb driver)
but for software, maybe tihiy win98rev pack maybe can be a quick solution, its support software compability layer (win9x,winme,win2k and even winxp support) and also a built in kernelxp

Dels, you said: "remember restart each time you attach a new hardware?" I am confused. You don't shut down your system when you add new hardware? How about when you replace the CPU? You keep the system running while you pop it in? Wait, how about a new power supply? How do you do that one? Quickly switch the power cables?! (Sorry guys, this is too easy. ) USB works just fine with Win9x, if that's what you are aiming at. If fact every USB device I used over the past 9 years worked just fine, both under Win95 OSR 2.1 and Win98. No reboots needed.

Did you mean new software? If so, that's untrue. NT systems have to be restarted after every major system update/upgrade as much as Win9x based ones do.

P2P and torrents already hold much of the software that ever existed... don't worry about availability

@Lunac
i'm think you're not dumb to see what i've said, yeah you must have power off system if you want to attach hardware.
what i mean in my post is when the "add new hardware" wizard finished you need to restart before starting to use the hardware, win2k - xp eliminate the need (for most case)

Win9x has that too. Also, I have lot of experience with system hardware upgrades on systems with Win2k/XP, and they require lot of restarting as well. In fact the other day I helped a family member install a SATA PCI Controller card under XP. Two restarts were prompted/necessary.

HAL is garbage by the way. Hardware Abstraction Layer that is. There was a thread similar to this one month or so ago. I described my experiences with NT 5.x systems and hardware upgrades. Getting these OSs to detect and boot with your new hardware is a pain in the a**. Amount of reboots is the least of your worries. Trust me.

I'd like also to thank Gape. Just finished building and testing a new PC, and installing win98SE. Without his packaged updates it would have been a nightmare to get the PC up-to-date.

I had to install a second time. First time made the mistake of enabling ACPI and IRQ sharing (APIC). Nothing but trouble. Now with the BIOS 'tamed' it's working really smoothly. Even the Alcatel Speedtouch boots ok without lock-ups. (sempron 3100+ on a foxconn motherboard with nvidia nforce3 250; XFX 6200 graphics card.)

Infact, the strange thing is, if I shut down and plug in a hard disk drive, after I turn my PC on again, it wants me to reboot again!

That's with Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

Windows 98 SE don't have the above issue. Once Windows 98 SE detects the hard disk drive, it's ready to go!

I've had that problem on XP, but with just plugging in a USB flashdrive:
Strange thing is, I didn't need to restart it at all, and it could read/write fine!

Are you able to supply the URLs for these?