When I used win98 some considerable time ago, when you get a fatal exception, it is hard to pinpoint exactly what has caused it and for most occasions a poor use of time trying to identify, just reboot.

The initial report would appear to be related to OE and when OE is closed down/crashed, the fatal exception usually works it way through each of the other programs in the system tray until eventually the complete taskbar disappears.

Often these crashes occure because system resources get so low that programs can’t work and the system crashes.