The closest thing you had to a HOME folder back in 98 was the "My Documents" folder, which I believe was still stored inside the windows folder, usually (but not always) "C:\Windows\My Documents" Everyone was still doing it their own different ways in 98, things got increasingly better (er, more organized anyway) with NT/2000/XP.

The safest/cleanest way is to just create a directory for your app and then store your config and your own temp directory beneath it. This way you don't have to parse spaces in pathnames and it's transportable across most platforms.