Network Drives and Need for Speed: Road Challenge

Hello. I've recently switched to from Win2k to Win98SE, because, in my opinion, it's the best gaming OS out there. Now, I've already encountered two problems:
The first is that I can't map the network drive of another computer in my LAN, which is using Windows XP. I used to just type somthing like \\Machine1\C and it would connect to that drive. Is Win98 any different? At first I thought I goofed in picking the drivers for my ethernet card, but I don't think that's the case, since I can map my router's hard drive fine, which is running Linux (and yes, Samba too).
On to problem #2: Need for Speed Road Challenge (or High Stakes in the US). It doesn't work. I installed the latest drivers for my graphics card (GeForce 2 MX400 64 MB), my sound card (Hercules Muse XL) and the AGP drivers for my motherboard (Elitegroup K7S5A) and, of course, DirectX 9. What I find most irritating is that it doesn't give me any errors at all. All it does is give me a black screen for a second or so and before I know it, I'm back on my desktop, with no errors whatsoever. I've already contacted (or at least, tried to) EA customer support, but all they did was pass me around like a hot potato, so now I don't even know who I should, or am, talking to.
Can anyone help? I'd really hate going back to Win2k or XP and I'm not even touching ME.
Thanks in advance!

try \\Machine1\C$

you need the "$" to access the admin share.

Thanks Four and Twenty, that helped. Also, I think I might've found the source to my NFS4 problem. I think it's the sound. The windows sounds play fine, but I can't hear any sound in movies although I'm sure I have the appropriate codecs and filters, and there isn't any sound in certain programs like console emulators. What's up with that?

Are your sound drivers DX9 compatible? Check DX Diag and run the sound tests.

If not you might need some codecs installed, check Windows setup to see if all Audio/Video compression are installed under Multimedia.

Yes, they are DX9 compatible. In fact, according to the website you MUST have DX 9 installed before installing the sound drivers. As for the Audio Compression drivers: the Multimedia category is ticked in bold (every sub-category is installed). I'm gonna fiddle around some more and if that doesn't work, I'm switching to XP. Thanks for the help, everyone!

glad to help