kiwi,
I have a Win98SE PC also. I don't use MS Word 2000 on it, even though I use it on my laptop.
I use AbiWord
http://www.abisource.com on my Win98SE PC and on my WinXP Home and Pro PCs.
AbiWord reads, writes and converts ALL Word documents. And it's free open source. It doesn't hog resources.
Good luck.