I was in my windows folder, and out of curiousity, I clicked on a file called “exit to DOS”. The file, true to its name, dumped me into dos. No big deal, but when I attempted to get back into windows, the machine restarted, and dumped me into dos again. So I shut it off, turned it back on, and once again, found myself in dos. If I start it up in safe mode, I can enter windows. I suspect that there’s an obvious and easy solution to my woes, but I don’t know of it.
Power down
Boot up, holding down the <F8> key
You should get a menu, asking which way you’d like Windows to start up - try ‘normal’, if that doesn’t work, try Safe Mode, then restart it again (i.e. start>shut down) from there.
IIRC doing that does not terminate Windows but rather starts the Command.com under Windows and typing EXIT will return you to Windows which is still running in the background.
Ack! I don’t know how I missed the entire second half od the OP, but sorry for suggesting something that you’ve clearly already tried.
I have a couple of Win98 machines at work that are set up to boot directly into DOS mode every time; I can’t remember how I made them do that, but I’ll be back in a tick with another suggestion.