New to emulation, need some help

[a500]

I have a pc consisting of

amd k62 450 mhz cpu
128 mb of ram
128 pci sound blaster
s3i verge pci "screen card"??

Anyways I'm new to emulation My questions are as following

1) Which winuae emulator release will work best on my computer?

2) Is there a way to save a state of a game? I don't know how to save the game "the secret of monkey island 2". I think I saw an option like that on the latest release but it didnt work very well on my computer.

3) Which operating system is the best for Winuae? I have windows 98 SE. any good? Also, winuae didnt find my controllers in windows 2000 professional, why?

4) Whats the deal with these configuration files when starting winuae? they don't seem to make much of a difference!

5) What is aiab? how do I set it up? where can i find HD filed games that I can use??

thats it for now then

[Djay]

1) Which winuae emulator release will work best on my computer?
-I tend to use WinUAE 08.08.R8/R9, i've found no slow down on similar specs to yours.

2) Is there a way to save a state of a game? I don't know how to save the game "the secret of monkey island 2". I think I saw an option like that on the latest release but it didnt work very well on my computer.
-the 08.21.Rx are the first to support "Save-State"

3) Which operating system is the best for Winuae? I have windows 98 SE. any good? Also, winuae didnt find my controllers in windows 2000 professional, why?
-Win 9x, ME and XP are ok

4) Whats the deal with these configuration files when starting winuae? they don't seem to make much of a difference!
-as you probably know, when Commodore brought AGA chip-set alot of A500 games/software didn't work, you can choose which Amiga chip-set you want to use, you may also wanna have a separate Hard-drive as well.

5) What is aiab? how do I set it up? where can i find HD filed games that I can use??
-Amiga-In-A-Box or AIAB in a complete "modern" Amiga set-up, see my site http://www.amiga.ukhq.co.uk [FEATURES] for a review...
-HD Games can be found at http://www.back2roots.org/ and a few sites at http://www.amigamos.com , don't forget to vote for EAB

Welcome to EAB, btw:)