...number/percent of people still using windows 98? I need to find out the approximation of how many people still use Windows 98 OS. I need this for research purposes, and I'm not sure about writing microsoft about it since they have, after all, already phased out that OS. Besides, I'm not sure whether they would give me that sort of information anyway.

Can anyone help me out? Please? It's really important.

As of 2004, Microsoft estimated about 25% of users were still running Win95 / 98 / and (shudder) ME.
When they killed support in 2006, the estimate was somewhere between 50 - 70 million users.

[Edit] I just looked a bit harder and found some statistics based on web traffic, via the w3 site (they are the group that manages web standards). Win98 dropped below 1% of web traffic over the past year and is sitting around 0.2%

Quite a few people (and lots of businesses) still have desktops running Windows 2000, which is understandable - it is still a pretty solid version and rarely crashes. For the most part, it was just XP without the round, shiny bits.