Multiple crashes undering Boinc/seti last 3 days

Win98, 512meg ram, Athlon xp2100. Current boinc (3.19) + seti (3.08)

All the crashes look the same. That is, the computer locks up hard.
Mouse doesn't respond, CTRL-ALT-DEL doesn't do anything. Have to hit
the reset button to restart the computer.
I had thought it was connected with running my media player
(BSPlayer) and boinc at the same time. Over the last 3 days I've tried
suspending boinc while watching videos. No crashes when I've done this.
HOWEVER, there are still too many crashes at other times.
I often notice I'm doing something related to copying files when it
crashes. Copying a file from the CD to the hard disk, unzipping a zip
file. Stuff like that. A bittorrent client is running almost all the
time. It was running almost all the time on the old seti program
without incident.
After the crash there are usually a few lost clusters here and there.
Some are obviously seti related (they look like the messages from the
boinc window) and there's a log file from my anti-virus program.
Disabling the anti-virus did nothing to diminish the frequency of the
crashes.
Although my computer is hardly the model of stablilty I've almost
never had crashes this severe, this often.
During the recent BOINC outage, once I ran out of work units, I had
no crashes like the ones I have while the new seti is running.
I had been running the old Seti (mostly CLI) since 1999 with few or
no problems (that I could blame on seti G)

These crashes are common enough and dangerous enough so that I don't
feel I can run boinc/seti on this computer anymore without risking a
massive hard disk screwup on a future crash. Not running the BT client
is not an option.
Unless somebody has a good idea I'll say so long to seti until I get
around to installing WinXP. I might start it up every week or so to see
if there's a new version of the seti client but would there be any way
to know if the changes were for more stabliity or for difference science
calcs? If they were for stability then I'd be happy to try it out.


There's a good chance some of you won't be coming back.
I can deal with that. - Synonamess Botch