@mcc Do tell.

@GeePawHill I just somehow got the machine in a state where I had no start bar, alt-tabbing showed the Windows 95 UI for alt tabbing instead of the Windows 10 one, I couldn't take screenshots, and when I tried to reboot the restarting… screen softlocked.

@mcc @GeePawHill the takeaway of this story is a whimsical thought that, somewhere deep inside modern Windows, all the original components of the Windows 95 UI are still in there somewhere, and will come back to life like Toy Story toys waking up, but if only you do the right konami-code-like incantation—which you accidentally just did, but only halfway through.

@hisham_hm @mcc @GeePawHill It's Windows 2000, and it's definitely all still in there. XP was reskinned 2K, Win10 (explorer, at least) is a reskinned XP and if you twist its arm hard enough one of Win11's failure modes is 'spontaneously turn back into Win2k.'

@mhoye @hisham_hm @mcc @GeePawHill That sounds more like a success than a failure to me turning into a less crap version.

@retrosponge @mhoye @hisham_hm @mcc @GeePawHill My benchmark is the dialog box you use for configuring environment variables. My feeling is that hasn’t significantly changed since maybe ~NT4, it just gets buried one click deeper with every big redesign.

@marshray @retrosponge @mhoye @hisham_hm @mcc @GeePawHill The environment variables editor actually got a very nice upgrade at some point, at least for editing the PATH variable: