dlinney,
Thanks for the input. I have looked at all you suggested. While none seem to be the issue I have encountered, they do seem to indicate it should be possible to run (at least SOME) 16 bit programs under XP.
Roots3 is an older version of a genealogical program that was bought out by another company, then removed from the market place, and no longer exists, so there is no support from the original progam writers. However, it also happens to have some very nice features that later versions (like Roots5) did not support.
The installation of the software does not require you to be an adinistrator, since the DOS based program simply copies the software to a directory on the hard drive, it does not install under the OS directly (remember how simple things used to be?).
The error message I receive is "insufficient memory to run the application", which is meaningless as the new system has plenty of memory and space, and the program does not modify either the autoexec or configurtation files, as far as I can determine (there are no entries in the Win98 files either).
I will keep digging, and maybe someone out there has resolved this.
Thanks,
David