I hear the era of GDI being run in kernel mode was...not good for stability or security, but I rarely used 2000 and never used NT 4.0 so perhaps there are better mouthpieces than myself.
By W2K a lot of problems had been fixed, and on the other hand 3.51 was still a bit early and wobbly in other areas. I thought GDI was still in the kernel?
Well Vista removed support for kernel-mode printer drivers (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/pr...), Vista introduced the WDDM model for video drivers in user-mode, 8 removed support for XDDM so I guess one could say that by 8, things had come full circle.