Accessing html files offline

After I installed [after a crash] Windows 98 SE, I was able to access html files from the Windows Explorer although it would first give me the error message of “cannot find …”. Now for some reason I get the error message of “this program performedan illegal operation” and in the detail I get “Explorer caused an invalid page fault in MSHTML at 0167:70 dcc f23” and a whole bunch of other addresses.
MS technical papers on this were no help. I tried uninstalling Gator and reinstalling it withthe current version. I uninstalled Comet cursor.exe. And there is no place to edit IE stylesheet in the Registry.
Does anyone have a suggestion. Of course, I can access html files through the browsers.