what program is it that you use for partition in winxp. There is different ones for linux but I prefer fdisk and what's the limit on partitions for win98?

If you plan on using /boot partition for lilo instead of MBR you can re-install windows at anytime without messing up boot loader. if you reinstall windows it writes to MBR and won't run lilo but you can fdisk /MBR and then it will work correctly again but it has to be done with dos fdisk not the linux version