Well, if you’ve confident you’ve got a clean WIN98SE install without any any Win98 binaries munging things up, and there’s no other solution, you can always lay out around $ 20.00 (unit + shipping) for a USB 2.0 card for the PCCARD slot in your notebook. Do any Ebay search with the keywords “USB” and “PCMCIA”. Dozens of listings will pop up. It would work better with the external CDRW drive in any case as USB 1.1 connections (on your notebook) are limited to around 2X-4x burn speeds because of the interface throughput limitations where 2.0 can keep pace with the drive to it’s max burn speed.
:smack: Doh! Keep forgeting that you can add PCMCIA cards to the things… (Used to taking the case appart to add bits to my home computer. 
Thanks.