Has anybody seen this ?
Occasionally, especially after doing larger file-operations on local (ATA-)harddrives, the Desktop on several of my Win98-machines freezes... open application-windows are not affected and running programs still run, but the desktop doesn't refresh - for about one minute. So when I drag a window over the desktop, I can see it's 'track'. All in all the system will not become really stable before you reboot the machine. If you don't, at some point explorer.exe (!) brings up error-messages and after that there's no other way than rebooting the system.
At least any running app's normally can finish their jobs if I don't 'do too much'.
Has anyone seen this problem and found a solution for this (besides using a decent OS...) ?

What is your chipset and what sound card do you have? This reminds me of a compatibility issue between VIA chipsets and Sound Blaster Live sound cards.

This is happening on several ASUS-boards, I think they all have VIA-chipsets - but none of them have a Soundblaster-card.....

I've seen the Windows Explorer lock like that quite frequently (when explorer locks, the desktop and taksbar lock, too). Less frequently after I scrubbed my system clean of adware, the Cydoor DLL was a common culprit for causing the problem in my case. Have you run Lavasoft's Ad-Aware on your system recently?

yes, and it found a lot when it first scanned the machine i use for browsing the internet.
now there's nothing left but a few cookies...!