Mark,

KEEP win98SE - it works the best, I have been using it forever for all my animations. You can run fractint from windows in a full screen shell, or you can boot up and stop at the command line without loading windows. No problems at all.

WinXP ? you see all the problems people here are having ....

FAT32 is what I have, again no problems, and Win98 actually will work better. FAT16 is not necessary, I did a lot of experimenting years ago to find the optimum fractint conditions.