Thanks for taking the time to answer.

I'd given up on the Win 98 idea some time before, but just noticed that it was coming up to the one year anniversary of my question happy_bday

In the end I got MiG Alley to work reasonably smoothly with XP, but campaign crashes wore me down after a while- I'll wait for the SoW:Korea installment for my F-84 GA fix.
Really hope they capture the vibe of MA, though.