Thanks for the sympathy. I was over-due, I guess. :-/
A free CD burning package I've used, BurnCDCC from Terabyte Unlimited, is a great tool, but doesn't specifically say that it will run on Win98. It does say in the .exe that Win32s is not supported (but that's used by Win 3.1x).
http://www.terabyteu...oads/burncdcc.zip - it's a 70 kB download.
Note that it's specifically designed to burn ISOs to CDs, so you'll need to create ISO files of the data you want to backup if you want to use it.
To create ISO files, you should be able to use the "mkisofs" program that's part of the "cdrtools-latest.zip" package here: http://smithii.com/cdrtools Note that I haven't tried them myself. (The zip file is 1.65 MB)
The CDRTools package is a Win32 compilation of some Linux tools. It probably has everything you need.
Condolences on the CD burner issues. I hope it's just a Roxio issue.
If you're thinking about a cheap Mac, keep MacofAllTrades in mind. They often have decent machines there for very low prices (but Intel machines are still not cheap): http://www.macofallt...lder_Macs_s/3.htm
Best of luck! I hope this helps.
Cheers,
Scott.