This is Nightowl's husband again.
Thanks to all for their suggestions!
This shareware memory management program claims to have a feature that deloads unused DLL libraries. That hasn't seemed to make a difference, but that might just be an ineffective memory management program.
I noticed that the web site that lists "bad tasks to have" lists CMAgent as a Bad Thing. We're running it because we're running McAfee Uninstaller. I might try disabling it to see if Uninstaller still works, and see if anything improves.
Windows 98 comes with a program called "msconfig" that makes checking all of the various startup options, including config.sys and autoexec.bat, a snap. I've been disabling things directly with Regedit, though.
The memory management program includes a swap file memory usage graph, so we might keep an eye on that to see if it provides any illuminating evidence.
Finally, I could just go ahead and upgrade every program on here, hoping that might fix the problem somewhere. We still have IE 5.5, for example.
I gotta have time to do something other than computer stuff this weekend, though!
Thanks again,
Nightowl's husband JohnF