I've been having the same 'Internet killed' prob's. Funny thing is, when I had Xolox installed on a year-old install of Win98se, Xolox ran with no problems. I just did a wipe and re-installed Win98se, and guess what? Xolox killed my internet (cable modem connection). Nothing short of a reboot would return net access. I had a wild thought and applied system optimizations (for win98 and for cable modems) and the problem is now gone. Get the sysopt.zip file here http://members.home.net/dkh46/sysopt.zip
Maybe it'll work for you, too.