Do you remember what parts acted like what?

The dirty secret was windows XP was just a skinned Win2k and the components were very similar.

I remember resisting XP for awhile and instead editing INF files so drivers would install on 2k for me.

Ah, yes, the manual repairs in the primitive recovery console. Look for .SYS and .DLL files with suspicious dates (unlike the others), overwrite them with EXPAND'ed originals from the setup disk, try booting the system. Had to do it recently on an old XP system after testing early 2000s tool that had no idea service packs existed, and “updated” system files.

We had a friend like that too, actually. We all made some mumbling explanation about "electrostatic discharge" so that we felt less uncomfortable being so superstitious, but yeah people would leap in front of him to avoid him touching their stuff. But yeah, he was one of the crew, so it's not like we were gonna not-invite-him.

> Also managing to have everyone on the same patch for $GAME could waste hours.

This one hits close to home.

IIRC, in some games it was not even that obvious that someone had a different version (e.g. maybe they just wouldn't be able to see the server in the list), which made everything take even more time.

That just reminded me that circa 2010 I created a Google Sheet with a list of all the games we used to play, which patches to download and from where. By that time it was getting quite hard to find some patches to older games.