For the last several days, I’ve has a small, sky-blue icon on the desktop taskbar (along the bottom; windows 98 Plus!) flashing; it looks like a solid “Q” or a comic-book word balloon. When I rest the arrow on it, it produces a normal balloon describing it as a “free upgrade”; but I suspect that I’ll trigger a virus if I click on it. (I have Earthlink and AOL as Internet Service Providers.)
Dollars to doughnuts says it’s RealPlayer.
Whether or not you classify it as a “virus” depends on your opinion of the software. While I wouldn’t call it a virus, I’d sure call it mediocre bloatware.
You can turn it off with msconfig (or whatever it’s called in Win98) so it doesn’t autoload with everything else in the system tray.
It is an Apple Quick Time icon. Apparently you downloaded Quick Time.
So it IS a virus! 
Cervaise was right. I watched someone else click on it on his computer. It’s RealPlayer, all right. I finally mustered the courage to left-click on it on my computer and it upgraded RealPlayer for me. Thanks to Cervaise and my friend who clicked on that icon himself. 
How to rid yourself of unwanted programs:
Step 1: open MSconfig
Step 2: Click the startup tab
Step 3: Uncheck anything that you don’t recognize or isn’t in a system directory
Step 4: Look up the remaining files online, uncheck them if they aren’t needed
No thanks required.
That is poor advice. Removing at item from MSconfig will not always keep it from running at startup. Some programs will stick themselves right back in there, with a checkmark next to their name. Often, these are the very troublesome programs you are trying to get rid of. Try it with qttask.exe sometime.
If you have a program causing you trouble, remove it. Fix the problem, don’t apply a kludge.