Crashing Explorer

Check the video drivers and run scan disk to make sure that you donot have disk errors.
go to the control panel and click the add remove programs tab,select Ie5,then click the add/remove button,it will give you a pop up screen,select to restore or repair,after this go to microsoft site and look up service packs and fixes to IE5.5.

Hi, IE 5.5 is full of bugs, and very unstable. I would start Windows in safe mode and uninstall IE 5.5 and reboot and try to use restore backup with IE 5.0 or IE 5.01 of the Registry, are to whatever IE you was using before upgrading to IE 5,5.

Microsoft pushes a lot of upgrades, and have not been fully tested. I do not recommend that you buy or download any new software or downloads from Microsoft until you have reveiwed a lot of different article about that software or downloads, so you have a better understanding what other people had problems and how to resolve them.

Take care and have a great day.

Definitely sounds like an active desktop situation. Don't use it.
Boot the machine into Safe Mode(hold the Ctrl key as it exits the boot screen and pick Safe Mode from the menu). Uninstall IE5.5. Then reinstall the previous version you were running. If you were running the base install from Windows 98, then you'll probably need to run a quicky reinstall. See if you can boot to Windows and do this as it will run much quicker. Just run setup.exe from the Win98 directory on the CD or better copy this directory to your hard drive, then run setup.exe from the directory on your hard drive.
After the reinstall, go to the windowsupdate.microsoft.com page and download/install all critical updates. Then download/install DirectX 7.0a

If all is well after that, you can try to upgrade to IE 5.5 or just apply all the updates to 5.0. Which would be IE 5.01.