Dos Prompt at startup

I'm sorry to bring the bearer of bad news, but both of those responses will not get you what you need. What has actually happened is your MSDOS.SYS has, in some manner, been over-written or corrupted. MSDOS.SYS is a necessary boot-up system file and must be 1024 bytes in size. I'm only on a Win95 machine but the I beleive that the file has not changed between Win95 and Win98SE - here is what it should look like:

[Paths]
WinDir=C:\WINDOWS
WinBootDir=C:\WINDOWS
HostWinBootDrv=C

[Options]
BootMulti=1
BootGUI=1
Network=1
;
;The following lines are required for compatibility with other programs.
;Do not remove them (MSDOS.SYS needs to be >1024 bytes).
;xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxa

NOTE: Because TechRepublic limits the length of a message, the rest of the file has been truncated. repeat the ;xxx...xxxa line and change the last letter for each letter of the alphabet until "s".

Good Luck!
640k

the previous answer looks very professional, and there is only a small thing i can add to it.
Please check Startup folder in registry to see if there are any programs listed there. The Registry folder is not just what you see in "Stsrt:Programs:Startup" but a lot more other things that can be loaded with Windows.
Thanks, Victor

One other possible answer is that some
application has generated a Autoexec.bat
and a config.sys in your root directory.
If there are such in the root, delete them.
windows dos not need them.