Networking XP (Pro) and 98(SE)

I've been tearing my hair out with this all evening. Thanks to Kony for
getting my P3 box up and running, I now want to network them. Said box is
now running 98, and I want to network it to my system. When they were both
running XP, it worked no problem. But, I have decided to turn the P3 into a
retro gaming box, so I installed 98. Now they're not speaking to each
other - I have run the Network Setup Wizard on both systems until I'm blue
in the face, they both have o/b NICs and are connected by a CAT5 crossover
cable - and they both have static IPs. Please bear in mind that I'm a
complete neophyte when it comes to networking and cannot go much beyond
setting bog standard static IPs (just the usual 192.168.0.x). I've tried
pinging and they're both sulking!

OK, partially disregard the above. The 98 box is talking to the XP box and I
can access the XP box from the 98 box fine. The odd thing is, when I ping
the 98 box from the XP box the results are rather odd - every result is
0ms(min/max/ave)! If it can ping it (there is no packet loss) then why can't
I access it from my system?!

I cannot afford to spend any money on new cards/routers/switch boxes or
anything else (I was going to buy a KVM switch - but the cheapest I could
find was £120!). It would be useful to have to save swapping boards and mice
all the time (the 'V' isn't so important as the monitor is dual output
anyway), but not at that price!

I have just run the XP NSW on the 98 box again and it errored out (cannot
complete the NSW).

What do I have to do to enable the XP box to talk to the 98?! In desperation
I even installed NetBEUI (which is unsupported under XP) but I had to remove
it as XP BSOD'ed.


HELP!!