> Well, if this tells you anything, my primary FAT32 partition with Win98se on it, had
> Win95 OSR2 before that, Win95 gold before that, WfWf3.11 before that, Win3.1 before
> that, DOS 6.22 before that, and DOS 5.0 before that.
I'm with you, but I went on to XP, by far the most screwed up (as well as most capable, of course) home OS MS ever botched. And the most difficult for end users to maintain. I'm sure Longhorn will be nastier. No wonder people prefer to reinstall "clean" regularly.
My primary OS is a continuous upgrade from from about DOS 3.1 (?), although it has been through several iterations of DRDOS on the way to MSDOS 6.22. While it was running the later DOS numbers, they were mainly something to run Windows 3.0/3.1 on top of. DRDOS put out a free patch to work with Windows 3.1 when MS broke Windows-DOS interlink, one of many efforts MS has made to drop its competitors. If you recall, back then you had to buy a version of DOS to go with Windows. Windows couldn't run without DOS. So, Windows in reality cost considerably more than just the Windows package itself .
People used to say that Windows up to 98se ran on top of DOS, but that is a bit misleading. As Windows booted, it replaced practially every piece of DOS with protected mode versions of the DOS calls.
But it is dubious to compare upgrades of Windows after 95 with what went before. DOS upgrades did not really use anything from the previous versions. Installations of programs generally kept their own files in their own directories, and if they needed to keep permanent settings, they used INI files of their own, so their was not much mixing of the OS with miscellaneous garbage.
True, by the time 95 superceded 3.1, several trends had begun, but just barely. Programs began to put settings in WIN.INI and SYS.INI, sort of ancestors to the now notorious "registry". They were probably even a few that used the Windows 3.1 registry. (The 3.1 registry was around 10K. Now it is like 10M.) Other regretable trends that had just begun were putting a program's INI files in the Windows directory, and throwing a piece or two of itself (some dll's) in the Windows directory, rather than the programs speparate directory. The concept of putting these pieces in the "system" directory is supposedly that they may be reused by other programs, thus reducing redundency. But, judging by what happens when programs are uninstalled, very, very few of these are used by any other program.
Those comparatively pristine, nostalgic days are gone. As it installs, your average major program romps merrily through the registry changing whatever it likes to suit itself. Some of this the uninstaller doesn't remove or change back to the original (if that is even possible.) DLLs which replace, supercede, or enhance functions of pre-existing DLLs, are dumped in quantity into the system directory, which the uninstaller sometimes never disentagles completely (if that is even possible.) The more you add, update, replace, and/or uninstall, the worse it gets.
>There have been a couple of times where I've basically had to restore the OS from a backup.
Any change that seems risky enough to need a backup, I don't do on my main OS first. I try it on a separate installation first.
This installation of my main OS has had a lot motherboard upgrades done under it, statrting with a 386SX. The hardest (so far) was W98 during a switch from an Intel BX mobo to an AMD VIA KT133 mobo. I had a incompletely working main system for 5 days before I found the last solution to the last bug.
In general, wierd problems have been registry settings, auto-loading background programs, auto-loading (incorrect) drivers, or drivers that auto-link to a confilicting dll.
Why don't I install clean? Because I don't know how to get back what I have. Because I have many programs that are upgrades of upgrades, programs that have been discontinued, or that have had to be patched and debugged to work completely years ago. Some of them are so old I don't even know if I could find the patches again, or I don't remember what all the patches were, or what I did to get it all working.
I still have a minor problem with XP which I didn't know I had untill 8 months after I upgraded. I haven't been able to track it down myself, and no references to it anywhere have a fix. I assume it is a registry problem. (No problem with a second installation of XP on the same computer.) Unfortunately, there is no way to track down bugs in the registry, other than guessing.