So, a few weeks ago, I found a video on YouTube showing what happens if you take the explorer.exe from XP and run it on newer versions, so naturally, I wanted to try it on my own.
The way you do this is simple: take the explorer.exe file from an XP installation, copy it to the target OS; set compatibility mode to Windows XP SP2/SP3; open up task manager; kill the running explorer process, and finally run the XP explorer.exe using task manager's run feature.
The most "stable" OS to do this on is Vista, I assume because it's taskbar and start menu are more similar to XP compared to 7 and newer. Everything apart from the standard start menu being broken and trying to shut down causing the process to crash (both of which also happen on newer versions) seems to work. In fact, one thing that only works on Vista is the classic start menu (again, I assume it's because that feature was dropped on 7 and newer)
And indeed, the classic start menu held a little surprise:
"Freestyle" is the codename for Windows XP Media Center Edition (original 2002 release), however, according to an image I found online (I'm too lazy to install XP MCE on VMware rn), the classic start menu on that OS doesn't show that text:
Can anyone confirm if this was known or not? And if not, what do you think is causing that text to show up?
Additional info: I took the explorer.exe file from an Italian XP Tablet PC Edition SP3 installation (w/ all POSReady 2009 updates installed), and run it on an Italian Vista 2002 SP2 installation with no updates installed (in fact, I had to set the compatibility mode to XP SP2 because SP3 isn't even listed)
