[Animal]

If you're sharing a dial-up a router won't really help you out much, since they are designed for broadband/ethernet.

What you need is a network card in both machines, and ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) to be active on your XP box. Don't worry about the difference in OS's, your XP install disk can be used to set up ICS on your 98 box.

You will need to connect both network cards together with cable, and then run the home networking wizard on your XP machine. It's quite simple and inexpensive to do.

Having said that however, you'll find that trying to use both machines on the internet at the same time will be quite painful with a dial-up connection, and will probably cause you more frustration that anything else. Using them seperately, ie. only one machine on the net at a time will be fine.