I confess... I bought Win 98 SE full OEM from ebay after I assembled my first computer from scratch. Why? A few reasons.
1) Wife had a Pentium 100 Packard Hell with Win 95 pre-installed. Buggy piece of shit. Wanted to upgrade. She's not computer literate, and is familiar with the interface. So, I put 98 there, and it does run better.
2) On my new screaming AMD 1900+, I want to play video games (occasionally) that are not available for my PS2.
3) My screamer has Linux on a 2nd partition. But had problems installing, namely kernel panic! Linux didn't like the Highpoint RAID controller on my mobo. Now, It didn't come right out and say this. After searching on googlegroups, I found an answer. Disable the controller in the BIOS. I tried, and it worked. Then my floppy wasn't recognized. Another search revealed that I needed to modify LILO. Then it worked perfectly. Point being... I couldn't access the web on my new machine directly (no modem) or indirectly through LAN without running some flavor of WIN. Linux runs horribly slow (with GUI which is how I prefer to surf the web) on the Packard Hell, whose modem isn't compatible with Linux anyway.
Moral of the story, sometimes it is, echh... "convenient" to run M$, even if it's only temporary. I haven't (nor do I plan to) purchase anymore MShit. I use the 602 office suite, and plan to move to open office. I've also recently learned TEX/LATEX, and LOVE IT. UBER-COOL.
As for internet, I have DSL now, and another Packard Bell that I just dropped two NIC's into, and am very soon going to convert to a Linux Router for my little LAN.