Scott,
No worries. You can help people for sure if you check the site regularly and learn as much as you can from the posts of the members for other threads. Some of them are really "EXCELLENT". Infact I've learnt more than what I've helped here. So read the threads here and you're definetely going to update your DB with lots and lots of info
PS : My signature says the needed

I'm sure that even now you can try out and help some of the people on the Win 9X forum. Some of them are common problems but for the more complicated we can learn from them and next time we can help someone if needed.