Dual booting Vista

I have purchased a refurbished compaq presario with Vista home installed.

I need to run a proprietary software for business that was written for W98.

A suggestion was made that by dual booting the computer I can avoid the driver problems problems that would develop if I just wiped Vista and loaded W2K. This scares me a a bit because I have had many problems in the past when I messed around with operating systems since I lack the requsite skills and knowledge to even consider myself an amature geek. So before proceeding in the valley of the shadow etc, I'm wondering if anyone has any stray thoughts on the matter. There is no rush because I have 28 days to decide whether I want to keep the computer or look around for another refurbished with XP instead of Vista. Many thanks in advance.