Back in my ISP daze we loaded up a machine with ME from the MSDN set. After poking around for a while we concluded that Microshaft actually took all the really bad features from Win98, WinNT, and Win2k and combined them into one OS so people who didn't already could hate Microschwans OSs easily and convienently.
In a !surprising number of cases replacing WinME with *any* other OS solves a plethora of problems.
I use 2K Pro, personally, and haven't had any problems at all. I used to have XP Pro running, and reverted back to 2K.