I see where you are coming from, but that is not quite fair. If you give Win98 256Mb of RAM and 384Mb to Win98se and Me they are extremely well behaved. They just happen to be total resource pigs, very prone to memory leaks. I always run a RAM manager with them and have found them very stable with the levels of RAM I just mentioned. But be careful, they are unstable if you give them more than 512Mb!!!
Fair point, but 256Mb of RAM wasn't the standard amount that shipped with PCs when Windows 98 was released - in fact it was probably more like 64Mb. So, for the PC environment at the time Win98 was new, it would cause at lot of BSODs. Obviously, if you pump some memory in that may stablise things, but then the requirements for Win98 didn't include a minimum of 256Mb of RAM.