These were old tricks but long long ago, when running my first Pentium, I forked out a lot of money at the time for a Philips CD reader. The only external stuff I could get at the time was direct dial up to Microsoft Australia and at 2k, you never got much then I found an ad for a CD full of shovelware and suddenly I had 600 meg of crap to literally shovel through.
RE : A box full of crap, not in the class of the one you mentioned in the mud for a year but my old monster ran for 6 years straight and when I had to pull it down, it was full of damp dust, various fiberous material, much of the boards in it were filthy so I had to pull it apart, clean all of the boards, blow anything else out and with the empty can, scrubbed the guts out of it.
It all went back together and worked OK (with a new set of fans) but PHARK it was a mess when I first opened it up.