Is LW installed on your present system ... it sounds like only onto external drives. Any issue with installing onto the c drive? Not sure why you can't find any prefs folder. Have you searched your external drives? I have never used LW on win 98 ... 2000 is what I use it on. And only rarely lately to solve forum issues (much more-so last year.)

If you went thru the set up procedure after installing, then your LW prefs will be somewhere. Need to set show hidden files & folders in your search window options before you actually search, not after.