Summarizing this thread, I think we have to accept that there's not much chance of Inkscape working on win98 in the near future. There's too many things broken there, and it's not even clear which one must be fixed first:
- I traced the latest crash to a drop-down list creation function in GTK;
- before that I and others were having a Pango crash - which I fixed but then it returned again;
- some people said it may be due to Cairo;
- most importantly, I cannot debug it properly, because it crashes at once when I run it from gdb (and so I cannot even be of much help to others willing to work on that).
With all this, I just don't feel like it's doable at all. Even if one issue gets fixed, others remain, and still others are bound to appear. So this decision (dropping 98) has, in a way, been brewing for a long time - though I would much prefer for this to not happen so soon.
Thanks to everyone who participated in the discussion, though. I have added a disclaimer to the release notes.
-- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org