tripple boot

First, where boot.ini, ntldr and ntdetect reside depends on which OS you put on first.
boot.ini should be on your first drive (c:) but the other two could be on either i believe (mine happen to be on c: as I put 98 on first (then upgraded it).
As for having two menus, well it does mean to get into linux I have to type linux then , and to get to either version of windows I just hit return then select which one I want from the Windows OS menu followed by
So at best it takes two hits of carriage return to get to windows XP (or none if I just wait till both menus timeout and default to going to XP)
At worst to get to Linux I have to type "linux" though I could have made ther label "l" for linux and "w" for windows, so it is hardlya major task to get to any of the three choices.
As for alternate boot loaders, you may still find you have to go through the secod menu for WinMe/2K anyway beacuase of the way the boot loader works. The best bet is to make sure that you decide what you want to default to and set reasonable timeouts (5-10 seconds is plenty) so that for lilo (lilo.conf) make sure you have the lines
prompt
timeout=50
default=win (or whatever label you want)
that gives a lilo prompt (at which point you can hit tab to find the available choices) and will default to windows after 5 secs (and yes the timeout is in 10ths of a sec)

Hope that clears things up or at least shows that having two menus is not a real issue.

A.C

Sorry I don't think I actually answered your comment.
The boot loader on the mbr will be as installed by fdisk and will load the OS loader form the boot record of whichever partition is set active (c: in your case)

Lilo replaces this loader but not the windows OS loader on your c: partition, which uses boot.ini to give the contents of the Windows OS menu to allow you to both into WinMe/2K.

All you are doing by putting lilo on the mbr is replacing the standard MS boot loader, it won't cause any problems with the OS loader. (this is also the reason why you loose any boot loader when putting on windows upgrades, because they tend to run fdisk /mbr to replace the boot loader when finished !!)

It is possible to load lilo onto the bootrecord of a partition (i.e. the one with your / on) and point to this from something like boot magic. It still does not, I believe, get round the MS OS boot menu problem.
It might be possible to use the MS boot menu (via boot.ini) to boot linux, itwould depend on how smart (or dumb) the MS OS loader is. I'll have a look see if I can find out.

A.C