NOW HERE'S THE THING ...
Since M$ has disowned WinUpdate the time has come for some Einstein on this forum to kick off an unofficial WinUpdate! Any takers.....

theres already two such things. autopatcher and this well known little site called mdgx maybe your,ve heard of it.

Not to get so petulant my friend! Mdgx and Soporific are doing a fine job but we're talking about something different so get your thinking head screwed on.

You want to make a repository of patches, right? I'm up for it. I've got the space/bandwidth, and I've looked into using jcarle's Windows Updates Downloader on Windows 9x.

If you make a UL for windows 98 you can point the download path to your hosting. I'd be happy to add windows 98 to our list of ULs.

WindizUpdate (www.windizupdate.com) works for many.

Check their forums for info.

Of course, you can't use it if you ONLY have Internet Explorer as a browser

I also have plenty of space and bandwidth, so please feel free to point to any file at my site, if you wish.
All patches are in this directory:
www.mdgx.com/files/
All service packs are in:
www.mdgx.com/spx/

Please e-mail me if you need more details.
Thanks.

HTH

... Ideally something that is akin to M$ WinUpdate i.e. a dedicated site which scans your machine to ascertain needed updates ...

I can donate some webspace if that would be helpfull ...

No. Websites shouldn't be able to access your files. However, a program that would connect to a website to verify if you have all the updates is a good idea.

maybe something like the autopatchers report function which than brings up a web page with links to all the updates you need to download and install

So did you try windizupdate yet? It works pretty well, it's free, it's had its source code opened up to users, it's well tested and covers most of XP (the site tells you what it doesn't cover and all of that is available easily elsewhere).

I haven't tried it fully in Win98SE as I manually installed all the updates from disk (previously downloaded from Microsoft) until I found how good the autopatcher is). Otherwise, you could always redesign the wheel but it's best not to have to reinvent it! lol

I installed it on my Firefox. Seems okay but I wouldn't go overboard about it!