Just in case you were tempted to upgrade to WinMe, I wanted to suggest you just stay with Win98SE. It's a better system. If all else fail you might want to reinstall it. I personally never had to resort to that.
You originally described your problem as seeing the 'Done but with errors on page' and at other times you seem to frequently get pages that load but without the images.
The people who claimed that the ATI cards are causing this are simply wrong. It's like having a car whose gas tank is empty and blaming the accelerator pedal for the symptom (being, no acceleration).
I have had all versions of IE since 3.01 and currently run IE5.5-SP1 (all the time with the same ATI card in the system and different video drivers). I had problems similar to yours in the past but the root cause was not with the card or drivers. Display problems caused by drivers don't usually manifest themselves in missing pictures. The driver either displays correctly what it is being asked to display, or else it usually will displays stuff in a corrupted manner. But web page formatting and whether images are received by your computer is something completely outside the scope of what a display driver is there for.
Actually, I tried the NetSonic internet accelerator at one point and uninstalled it because I was having pages often load with the graphics missing, or just load plain slow, or incompletely. Your problem might be network related. Either it is a configuration problem, or your ISP might offer poor service, or network congestion at the time and places you are trying to reach caused requests to time out and prevent pages to load fully. Some people build web sites on their home computer and use that as a server. This kind of setup is easily ovewhelmed. Try accessing powerful sites like microsoft, cnn, etc.
Seems like these problems are persistent for you. Sometimes it is hard to trace the root cause of a new problem. Have you always had this problem or can you remember about when it started? I'm not asking for an answer - ask yourself the question.
If you can remember about when it first appeared then try to remember what changes you made to the system. Did you change the hardware, did you add or uninstll software, did you changed configuration parameters, did you change stuff in the registry? If things worked better before some event, try undoing/correcting what you did. Sometimes freeware apps that claim to transform you computer into something it isn't are causing all kinds of problems.
First make sure all is well in device manager, and fix any problem you find there. If you overclock, try not o/c'ing temporarily until you have found and corrected the cause. The idea is that sometimes several things can contribute to a problem. Is your modem working correctly? Are you having unusually slow connect speeds? Are you also having problems with downloads (they are slow or they fail).
Run diagnostics. One that comes to mind is a web browser tester/tuner at
http://www.browsertune.com/bt2kfast/. Another place to go is PC Pitstop at
http://64.29.193.182/
Something might be out of date in your system. Sometimes applications install outdated DLL versions in the system and things start to go wrong after that. There are sites on the web that offer software update help. In addition to windows update you could pay a visit to
http://updates.zdnet.com ou use the CatchUp service at
http://catchup.cnet.com or the BigFix program at
http://www.bigfix.com.
Don't go and blindly install all the updates these sites or programs suggest. Start by perusing the updates lists, find and read their descriptions, and see what seems to relate to the problems.
As for whether your failed attempt to install the 2560 driver might be causing this, I believe not, but it may cause other problems just to have had a failed install. It all depends at what stage it failed. If you can display at better that 640x480 in 16 colors then things perhaps are not too bad. In the future do avoid running your virus scanner or install monitoring apps while upgrading ATI drivers. Use the clean install procedure posted many times on this site (search for it).
Good luck!
Regards, ../Klingon
