Applications wont run on peer to peer

Until recently we had a small peer to peer network of 4 machines running win98 off of small linksys switch. Wanting internet we upgraded the netgear to a linksys box and then because one of the machines died we put in a new xp machine and changed the networking from netbeui to tcp/ip. We now have a problem where when the win98 boot up and we try launch programs quite often they hang. We get the egg timer and then it just goes off. If we ctrl alt delete we can see the process in the box but the applictions does not run. I t hink this problem is something to do with mapped network drives as all the machines connect to one of the 98 for a central data file. This problems does not effect the xp machine just the 98. Any ideas would help and when we do get an error message it refers to 0028:c0277001 vredir(03). Upgrading this vxdhas not resolved the problem. Also quite often we get a not responding message for Q4. However no information can be found on the process q4 as it does not appear on ctrl alt del nor does it reveal in a search. Any help would be apprecaited. Especially what q4 is. Ta