I downgraded to Win98 on my laptop because it was faster loading and I only use the laptop occasionally at the weekends for short times so fast loading is quite important to me!

Use the hibernate feature then. I only clean boot my laptop running 2000 (again ,XP hated it) when I bring it into work, due to the dock and network changes. At home, I press the sleep button, and have it set to hibernate instead. It speeds the "boot" time up by quite a bit, since you also don't have to wait as long for programs to launch again, as they may still be cached in memory.

I find the stability of 2000 to be much higher then 98, especially on a laptop where hardware may come and go at any time.

And as far as games, well, almost anything I could run directly in 98 hasn't had a problem in 2000. Older DOS games that had a problem in 98 don't work in 2000, but thats what my upcoming classic game box will be for. The only other games that have given me a hard time are ones specificially coded. Mechwarrior 2 (Glide edition) seems to hate 2000, but my Voodoo 2 cards will be pulled off the shelf and put into the classic game machine anyhow.