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The "mini" Windows 3.1 it came with was pretty much fully functional though, you could literally boot directly into PROGMAN.EXE as the main Windows 95 shell.

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Program Manager is a shell and was actually included in Windows all the way through XP SP2 when it was phased out. You can probably run it in Windows Vista through 10 if you copy the .exe over, too.

Unfortunately not, I just tried running the copy included with Windows XP SP1 on Windows 11—it relies on SheRemoveQuotesW which was removed from Shell32 in Windows Vista. (It doesn't seem to be able to use a copy of a Windows-XP-sourced shell32.dll from the working directory, either).

That's because Windows 11 only comes in 64-bit flavors and Program Manager as bundled with XP would be 32-bit. WoW64[1] can't bridge 64- and 32-bit binaries in the context of system components, such as the shell.

Try running that under 32-bit Windows 10, I never tried it myself but I have a feeling it should work.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoW64

can technically be patched with ReeactOS's implementation of the functiom.

Maybe! Is the XP version 32-bit? 64-bit windows never supported 16-bit programs.

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