will-
"On my Dell with XP Pro, the computer can boot into DOS to run all the RSS. "
Are you saying your Dell has a dual boot system installed, with DOS and XP?
Or that you can run the RSS software from the DOS emulator that is included in XP?
(XP is NT 5.1, there is no DOS in it or under it, unlike Win9x versions, which could shell out and reboot in a real DIS environment, because they were just "DOS-based" OSes to begin with.)
And which version of the RSS is that? I'd heard the final one (3.x?) did better at this business of running under dos-not-dos.