Is dot net really stable on Win98?

[Jim Haynes]

Our Visual Basic application requires precision mathmatical operation in order to converge to a solution (QR algorithim to extract eigenvalues and eigenvectors). Out test case is one that is rather difficult to converge on a solution. With our application compliled and installed on WinXP provessional it always converges to the precise solution. With the exact same compilation installed on two different Win98 machines, we find convergence problematical.

That is, sometimes we can compile it and install it and it might converges on Win 98, later compilations with no change and it does not converge and solution is impossible(the most usual case). One factor that may be important is that our XP machines are all Pentium III and up while the Win98 machines are Pentium II and Pentium I.

Another phenomena we find is that several functions in .Net visual basic (e.g. Sign) provide an error "Floating point not-a-number" error on Win 98 but produce no error on XP or 2000.

This is all quite disconcerting to us since we can only debug on the XP machines to see what is really happening.

Has anyone else had this experience with instability in extreme precision mathmatical solutions with .Net? I would be happy to provide a link beta compilation for any interested in checking this phenomena for themselves.
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