SOLVED networking Win98 & XP

Thanks everyone for your suggestions.

Incredibly shortly after posting my message I found a
techie who came to my home office and fixed the networking
problem. I never could have solved it myself, and to be
honest I'm not sure exactly what he did. He put back the
Netgear firewall and changed the IP addresses and a few
more things and miraculously the two computers were
networked. I specifically bought a new Dell because I had
had great support from them in the past, but this time not
only did I have to buy a 3 month support package for $49,
the two people I talked to were not knowledgeable and
then, after buying the support package, I found out that
Dell will not support ANY networking issues!

So everything got networked and then we started working on
the 2.163GB Outlook pst. My original problem was that
Outlook wouldn't come up, crashed on starting. I had had
the >2MB pst problem before so I knew how to run the
truncate utility, repair utility, etc. After a few hours
of fooling with the pst file (and of course I had already
spent 2 full days fooling with it), I noticed something
strange about the file. I had another one exactly the
same size with a last accessed date of 2 years ago.
Again, to make a long story short, the file I was trying
so hard to fix was in fact the file of 2 years ago. My
current inbox file, which I had renamed and forgot I had
renamed, was just fine.

In the end the problem was that Outlook got corrupted and
needed to be reinstalled (which I did using Outlook
2002). Nothing was wrong with the pst file at all.

Now my machines are happily networked together, Outlook is
working, all is peaceful again.