I would seriously reccomend removing Norton System Utilities off your DAW drive/partition. It will only use more resourses and in terms of recording will acutally cause your system to be "unoptimized".

You should format if necessary and do a clean install of that operating system and then reinstall your software. Norton software will never be completly removed unless you do that. It installes many files and information into directories and the registry that will not come out.

If you want to keep your system optimized for recording then you should take some simple steps first like... defragmet your drive regularly, run scandisk to remove any loose file fragments.

You said you are running Windows 98se for your DAW. That is a good choice but I might suggest using XP Professional(not Home). From the specs you posted it might barely be able to handle it. If you need two seperate operating systems you can just install XP for both and boot to either drive/partition. Another very important issue are the "services" your system is running in the background, you'll want to turn them off. It is a little different for each OS but it will dramatically improve your performance. Also don't install any unnecessary accessories or software. If you want to know more about turning off services then let me know for what OS?

Back to the Norton problem... A couple years ago I also ran into this problem. As I recall, the early versions of Norton Utilities would install and also add files to each other drive attached to your system. As you stated you have XP running on the other drive, so with some of the new security XP implements it won't allow those files to be added to that drive thus creating the problem you have now. Like I said before my opinion would be to remove Norton. But if you want to keep it then the easiest solution is to also install it into XP and controll it from either OS. That solution does work. Here's one thats a little tricky... You would need to find out what files it wants to place on the other hard drive and manually put them there. Sorry, I can't remember which files. You may also have to change some permissions in XP to allow this.

What I also think happened is that the MBR(Master Boot Record) for XP was hosed, not the MBR for 98. XP on your C: drive was the controlling MBR. If can find someone who has a dual boot with win 98 and XP ask them to copy you these 3 files off their system onto a floppy, "NTLDR", "boot.ini", and "Setupldr.bin". Try to boot off that floppy first and if it works then copy them to your system (XP drive). The files are hidden system files so you'll have to enable that view in the folder settings. On your floppy use the command "location""filename" -h to unhide.

You also made the right decision by not using Boot Magic, it's better to do it manually.

This is all off the top of my head so if I think of anything esle I'll let ya know. Hope you get your problem worked out!