I never really had stability issues with Windows 95 as long as I kept to the drivers originally supplied with it - basically, any hardware older than the OS itself. As soon as non-trivial vendor drivers (or bad software) came into play, stability suffered. This also seems to be the sentiment echoed in the oldnewthing blogs (which I can recommend, just on general principle) by Raymond Chen.
Looking at the Compaq, I'd avoid the original Windows 95, but OSR2/OSR2.5 should work fine. If you can get the memory to 32 MB or more, Windows 98SE is a good option as well, depending on what you want to do with it. On my P133 machine (socket 5, no USB), I ran Windows 95b for years because it was faster than Windows 98SE - but I did have the IE4 shell upgrade and IE5 installed, so most Win98-requiring software would work fine.
On a 486-class machine, I'd recommend the original Windows 95 with IE5 (but without the shell upgrade). It is faster, requires less disk space and allows running Windows 3.1 in DOS mode without dual boot.