98 collapses easily under pressure, and has memory leaks
NT is better, but suffers from the blue screen too often
ME no experience
2000 getting better. Can stay up for weeks at a time
XP seems to be quite reliable. Don’t have sufficient info yet
One OS you did not review, Windows 95 with several patches and Winsock 2.0 SDK -- stable as rock. Ran it in college for years as combined workstation/webserver, average time between crashes is something like once every 90 days, and some of that is likely attributable to cooling problem with hardware (K6-233).
XP crashes with many multimedia apps. Box here quite stable but that is because it is never used.
AEM7