Nice impulse buy!!! I am impressed!!! No hard drive, power supply or case, though???

Already got all of those, and they're fine.

You will need to go through and disable any of the services you do not need (by hand) on server.

That is among the things I normally do when installing any NT-based OS, so I should be all right in that respect.

There are a number of cool features of server that are nice (Terminal Services, for example), but make sure you lock it down properly.

Agreed, TS is one of the reasons I was considering installing Server instead of Professional.

I would not recommend the upgrade path, though. If you have rebuilt everything else, you might want to take the time to build the W2K from scratch.

Absolutely agreed.

Although, now I'm considering the possibility that I might not have to rebuild at all. I just now got the system to boot using my original installation of Win98 (non-SR2) and everything is working again. The system was refusing to boot in Win98 for a while because of an error with NDIS.VXD, but a google revealed that the original win98 NDIS.VXD will have this problem with any CPU faster than 2.something GHZ. So copying the SR2 version of that file over the original version took care of it.

If the tips Mark linked (thanks Mark!) about how to get a gig of RAM running under Win98 will work for me, then there's no reason to do the nuke and pave at the moment. The RAM was the only reason I was even considering Win2k on this box.

If the RAM works, I have only one remaining problem:

I need to install the Intel chipset, USB2, and mobo-soundcard drivers for the new motherboard. Those installers refuse to run under 98-retail but will run under 98SR2.

Now you might say, "Just upgrade to SR2 then", but I've (a) not yet seen any problems on 98-retail that I couldn't solve with some time and effort, so I've never had to install SR2 before, and (b) I've faked out SR2-only installations before and not had any trouble at all. So I think I'm going to try faking out these installs and seeing if they'll work.

If that's the case, then I don't see a reason to nuke and pave as long as the system remains as stable as it's been.

Thanks for all the help and advice everyone!