not too long ago microsoft announced that it was going to discontinue support for win9x/ME. They did not even want to release ME, but felt the public left them no choice.

They said there would be no more SP for them and no official driver support. They are basically trying to force people to upgrade to windowsXP, so this move by microsoft to have conflicts with DX8 and win9x/me does not suprise me. They know most new games comming out will require dx8, so if people want to play them they will have to upgrade to XP

but then i could just be a paranoid conspiracy freek