Ok, my PC is starting to act up. Here are the symptoms:

a. IE - cannot open a link in a new window. The window will launch but the page will not load. I can work around this for most pages by clicking the 'stop' button then F5 to reload the page, but pages launched by javascript cannot load at all, & I can't do anything about it. I need to file my income tax returns by 15 Apr, & doing it electronically is the easiest. Unfortunately the tax authorities only sent me the necessary stuff for e-filing (since I've been e-filing for two years now), and I don't have the forms for a paper submission.

b. Install/uninstall wizard - I was trying to uninstall BG2 just now when I got this weird error message:

Error Number: 0x80070725
Description: Incompatible version of the RPC stub. Setup will now terminate.

Can't install/uninstall any programs. Using the add/rmove function of the control panel doesn't work either.

c. I have Norton Systemworks installed. Used to be able to do LiveUpdate without any problems. Now when I try it I get a message that LiveUpdate can't find any products that can be upadted by LiveUpdate.

This is really weird, and I would really be grateful if someone could tellme what's going on here.

If I need to reinstall Windows (I'm using Win 98 SE), can I just do it without having to reformat the hard drive and reinstalling countless other programs?

I havent a clue whats wrong with your PC. But an incompatible stub indicates something is far wrong.

Best thing to do would be to reinstall windows on top of the existing copy. It should overwrite whatevers wrong, but it might not. If it dosent work your down to a complete reformat.

Goes without saying that taking backups of your savegames and those tax documents would be extremely wise.

you can reinstall without formatting, but a format will get you a much cleaner longer lasting install.... 98 is a bit of a pain, i used to have to reinstall every 6 months or so...

If you need tax forms the paper kind the U.S.Post office has them.
If your running windows 98SE just put your disk in and reload it. I had the same problem a couple years ago and found out that if you use fire walls with W-98SE this could happen again. I removed the cheap Fire walls I was using and reloaded win-98SE 18 months ago and have never had this problem since.
Good Luck!

Thanks will give your suggestions a try.
Fortunately I'm using Win 98 SE.

Just an update ... my PC in the office is experiencing the same problem too.
Could it be some sort of virus/worm?
Anti-virus scans show everything is ok, though, on both home & office PCs.
Really weird...

Have you updated that virus scan?

Also it could be another form of malware, so run Adaware and Spybot SD.

I run my AV prog once a week. Also Ad-aware. Both haven't reported anything unusual.

Solved my problems!! Turned out that somehow the wrong version of a *.dll file got installed. Just get the right file form Microsoft and viola!!