Well... Win2k is pretty stable and works ok. It's quite bloated though. And no matter how much memory you throw at it it seems to always have about the same memory free.
Stop adding memory and start working out why it's using all that memory! My machine, with all the stuff I want loaded on startup uses 64MB RAM. That's 30MB less than it would do had I not configured it properly and still loaded the extra stuff I wanted.
DLL hell
Has long expired, unless you choose to run the absolute worst software on the planet.
When something goes wrong with Windows you have no choice but to reinstall.
That's only due to your unwillingness to learn how to solve the problem properly.
I had Win2k running for about 2 years without reinstalling... suddenly one day may keyboard died (yes it just stopped working) which made Windows freeze, so I had to reset the computer, and that destroyed the Win installation... only a reinstall helped. Just because I had to reset. This would never happen to a decent OS.
If that is truly what happened, then more happened than you think to cause Win2k to die completely. I've never seen NTx just "give up the ghost" and die, without heavy provocation. That's out of at least 80 Windows NT4/2k machines I set up.