Les ,
I don't think your analogy really holds. Whether or not you can boot your Windows 98 installation is not really as critical as whether your aircraft will stay in the air. So where's the harm in trying a few things to see if you can fix a problem? Perhaps FL310 should have warned about the risk of static damage to components while cleaning - but then again I've been messing around inside PCs for years and never managed to fry anything. And even if you do cook a part - well the only single component inside a PC worth more than £100 these days is the processor itself.
Most of the problems people ask about here can be fixed with a clean installation of the OS – but people generally don’t want to do that because they don’t backup their data regularly. So a bit of messing around is usually in order to determine whether something can be salvaged.
Now if you really want to screw up a system take lessons from me. At the beginning of this week I managed to kill a colleague's installation of NT 4.0 and spent a day trying to undo the damage. Then later in the week I managed to render one of my own installations of Windows 2000 totally unbootable. Another day's work to resurrect the system.
Anyway, from this week’s experiences I’ve learned two things….
1) If you’re going to install Norton Antivirus on a Windows 2000 SP2 system running IE 6 make sure you disable the Norton “Script Blocking” facility before you establish a dial-up connection.
2) Do not install Roxio Easy CD Creator 5.0 on a Windows 2000 SP2 system – it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
3) If you do make the mistake of installing this Roxio software on a Windows 2000 SP2 then NEVER try to install/upgrade the Intel Ultra ATA drivers. Don’t even think about it!