dleigh,
Your best bet is to check out Outlook on Office 2000. That will require an upgrade but Outlook 98 can not hold a candle to Outlook 2000. I've run Outlook 97, 98 and 2000 and finally with Outlook 2000 I find that it is a very stable program. It is now pretty close to Outlook Express 5.0 but with many additional features. I have clients that use it both for in-house network mail and as an e-mail client. I use it for my customer contact data base and find that it is easy to track appointments and clients with out the crashes experienced with Outlook 98.
I hope that helps.