> I'm also reminded how trivially easy it was to configure Win9x to use a different shell: you'd just edit system.ini under [boot] to say shell=litestep.exe and you were done.

Fun fact, Win98 still had progman.exe installed (from win 3.1 and earlier). I had to switch to it in system.ini one day when something in explorer got corrupted and the normal UI wouldn't load.