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is 2024 and I still maintain a VB6 project. A client of mine (a aluminiun metalurgic compoany from sweeden) have all his machines controled but a central program in vb6. Since the machines are all old, they have integrations using windows COM+ protocol.

Its a offline application, that connects to SAP exchanging text files, so they have no reason to update so something more modern.

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Not being able to replace hardware easily seems like a disaster in waiting.

Running old versions of Windows in emulation or virtualization is really easy.

Activating it isnt. I havent found a way to make the old version worth without installing some hacked fix that I have no idea if I can trust or not.

Windows 2000 was the sweet spot for that, for sure. A volume license version of Windows XP will activate without any "mothership" to talk to, as well.

They use an old offline machine with winxp to run stuff in factory. But they are replacing for virtualmachines now that the old hardware is dying. other than that, it runs really well. Sometimes, months without rebooting.

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