Windows 98se shutdown problem... and AOL

Hey guys,
I've been helping my mum's friend set up her old computer with broadband, and it's working OK now with AOL Gold. Her husband isn't very computer literate and alot of the time the computer dosn't shut down properly (It freezes on the windows 98 is shutting down screen) and he just turns it off at the button. When She turned the computer on today a scandisk picked up about 20 errors, some on empty clusters, others on clusters containing IE5 folders (something like content\IE5\some number). She isn't sure if the shutdown issues started after getting AOL or whether they were there before as she didn't use the computer much before then. She's worried because the scandisk told her the hard drive might fail and she should take it to a computer specialist right away!

So she's asked me to sort it out and I'm not really sure what to do, initially I remove some startup programs and installed anti-virus and anti-spyware software to get the computer up to scratch, ran the defrag and scan disk and all was fine. I never had any problems with shutdown crashes but they seem to always happen when I'm not there. I think this might be an issue with AOL as it uses its own version of IE as a browser but I don't know, Windows XP makes it much easier to figure out what the problem is!

So, could turning off the computer from the switch when it crashes during shutdown damage the clusters? If so would that eventually destroy the hard drive. She has mentioned getting me to build her a new PC with Windows XP, would that be the best option? What sort of errors crash the computer when it reaches that black screen with the orange writing (i think it's windows 98 is shutting down, but I havn't used windows 9x for about 4 years).

Cheers
Alex

 

Bump