I have taken two blank hard drives on two completely different systems, put windows 98 SE on them, connected to the net via modem, downloaded gnucleus and it works fine.
you may be in need of a DLL or something that got removed with something else, any chance you can reinstall windows? It works great with a new system, with nothing on it and nothing installed then removed, so I think you are missing something that is installed when you install windows.