I am aware that the win9x and winnt/2k/Xp platforms are radically different ... different kernel ....etc. For low level system programs, I would not even dream of attempting to get win9x apps to work on winnt or vice versa. A number of progs that work in linux kernel 2.4 incl. filemon from sysinternels will not work in 2.6 because of lack of low level backward compatility. So just no point, like trying to transplant B747 instumentation on to a concorde.

I was refering to normal user progs that insist on XP/2k. Partly, because of the limitation of win4lin not supporting XP and partly because of big investment in time installing and getting all my apps working in win4lin/win98, I do not relish switching to a different setup altogether with all the installing and related headaches. For this reason I have spend a fair bit of time trying to get progs to run under win98.

In some cases I just install on my laptop running XP and copy the folder. Dependency walker is a great help here to try out various combinations/versions of dlls to get the app to work and not to break another app. In other cases I have had to resort to installer trichery such as decompiling the installer package and manually getting everything to work. Sometimes successfull, sometimes unsuccessful or simply did not have the time to keep at it.

As the other poster said, M$ has a self serving deliberate policy to arm twist vendors to certify their apps "winxp compatible" forcing vendors to use XP specific libraries for gui crap like themes support ...etc. With Linux, if an app required additional libraries, you just install those packages. With windoze you have to upgrade the entire OS.

I for one tend to resist the, no doubt, persuasive attempts by M$ to get me to upgrade to the latest version of their confounded OS. win9x, Me, 2k, XP even though different are still similar in that they are all a major pain in the ass. After over ten years of hell, I really like the linux/win4lin/win98 setup. win98 now runs on the ext3 fs and if win98 locks up, just kill the process and restart. And I keep an image on CD handy in case win98 corrupts entirely.

And I only use windoze because I have to as a result of the great majority of the world entrenched in the windoze world. Now if only something like Apple OSX would really take off with the best of worlds of windoze gui and unix stability and we all started using the wxwindows cross platform gui toolkit and standard libraries, we could break the stranglehold that M$ has us in.