I'm using the dibrom lame 3.90.2 and EAC. Things are mostly working but every now and then lame dies with an invalid instruction error; this happens maybe every 10-15 songs or so. Exiting the dos window isn't enough, I then need to ctl-alt-del and kill lame; then EAC starts a new lame and everything works for a while.

Any ideas on why this is happening and how I can fix it? With lame crashing I cannot leave the machine unattended to work through the queue of ripped tracks. It also messes up the track lame was working on since it renames it while encoding.

I'm using win98se; the machine is a 500Mhz AMD K6, not overclocked. Lame options --alt-preset fast standard. The exact error is:

This program has performed an illegal operation and will be terminated.
Quit all programs, and then restart your computer.

The program tried to execute an invalid instruction.
Fault location: 0000:00C7
Interupts in Service: None

Are you positive this is only happening with Lame? Troubles like this (illegal op errors for no clear reason) can sometimes indicate the beginning of a dying RAM chip. It can also indicate the presence of a virus, or a hard drive problem.

FWIW, I don't think it has anything to do with Win98SE. You might try removing your RAM and re-seating it... doing this occasionally with my DDR chip seems to solve an intermittent problem which I suspect relates to the chip gradually unseating from CPU fan vibrations.