Unregistered... I'm pretty sure you are having the same problem as we were at work... Windows 98 has a problem of "leaking" network sockets... It's on their support database somewhere (I did research on this a long time ago - last year)... What happens is often times Windows 98 and not the programs will not close out the network sockets after using them... now your supposed to come with 65535 sockets but that's another thing that windows 98 never implemented was full use of the sockets (the number is much lower but I am not sure how much lower)... Essentially though everytime you connect to the net in some fashion you are "eating" up one of these sockets (ie: checking mail, viewing a web page, gnutella connection)... and since windows doesn't close them after use it means that you can't use that socket again during that windows session... a lot of times you can extend the amount of time you get on the net by doing some things... 1) remove ad software as those of times connect back somewhere everytime you load a page 2) lower the frequency that you check your e-mail 3) other things that will prevent unnessecary socket usage...

I spent weeks researching this last year as we were baffled at work... and it was frustrating us to no end... the only way to truely "fix" this problem is to change OS's... we upgraded to Windows 2000 after I found this out and the problem went away immediately... hope this answers your question but unfortunately there is no quick fix...