Boot hangs at "Loading USB support"

I have recently installed Mepis on a dual boot (Wind 98SE) Athlon 1GHz pc and often booting to Mepis fails with the message: Loading USB support... segmentation fault.?? Sometimes it works, mostly not.?? Windows always boots without problems.?? I'm totally green with Linux, but would like to use it as I'm fed up with the Win98 crashing and freezing.?? Does anybody have any ideas??? The same thing happens whether I'm booting from hard drive or from the live CD.??