The solution is not to patch Windows 98.
Life moves on and keep moving... Windows won't stop due to hacks... Windows 98 is not safer...
There is a fundamental difference in structure between win9x, and winxp and later. That fundamental difference is that, in win9x, everything runs in the high privilege mode, whereas, in winxp and later, only the operating system runs in high privilege mode and all user programs, including antivirus, run in the lower user privilege mode.
By high privilege mode and lower user privilege mode, I mean the two bits in the microprocessor flags register, which, once set to the lower privilege mode, can't be set back to the high privilege mode without creating an exception condition.
Without going through all the details, this difference between win9x, and winxp and later, means that a virus that infects winxp and later gets a higher privilege on the computer that it has infected than all of the other programs, including antivirus, that are on that computer, with the result that it can hide itself from those other programs. I recognize that win9x can get infected, maybe even more easily, but it is much harder for the infection to hide itself with antivirus present since all programs on a win9x computer have the high privilege level.
So what if my win9x virtual machine gets infected, provided that I am made aware of it right at the time of infection, either through the antivirus complaining or some other strange behavior such as the virus trying to kill the antivirus since it can't hide from it? It is only a virtual machine that I can simply delete and the virus is gone. Unfortunately, the same is not true for winxp and later. I have personally seen many times, antivirus software, including avast, running just fine under the suspect winxp say that no viruses were found, but when the same antivirus, again including avast, is run under a clean winxp, it then finds the viruses that were hiding in the suspect winxp system.
Therefore, I maintain that win9x is safer, not because it can't get infected since it can,
but because, if it gets infected, the chances of me being made aware of the infection right at the time of the infection are much greater. Again, it would be really good to get this problem fixed and keep the support for win9x.