There is one really good thing about Windows Vista: It poses the perfect excuse to deny installing 10-year old 16bit applications.
Frankly, I'm shocked about the high percentage of legacy applications still in use. About every week we're having trouble with these old programs at work, breaking down under all the permissions and group policies.
People should get one thing straight: Just because an application works on a old 90MHz machine doesn't mean it works on a dualcore 2GHz beast. And time probably didn't stop, there should be a sufficient replacement for a 10-years old application.
ProcMon is quite a useful tool for people plagued with these junk pieces. The compatibility mode also proves itself to be useful at times. But come on, why bother?
Either you don't upgrade your old systems and just keep the applications running on Windows 98 or you say bye-bye to the machine, the OS and the application and move on. Everything else is just blasphemy.