>Dear Mr. Other Broken Record <g>,
>
>Well, you are correct that there is some pieces of DOS, primarly used in the boot process. But it is *not* DOS 4.10. That is the Windows version. I have seen the DOS version referred to as DOS version 7 before (perhaps in Peter Norton's book on Windows 95, or in Windows 95 Unleashed by Sam's Publishing), not be confused with the version 7 of DOS that was put out by other software makers.
>
>Once inside of Win9x, if you run a command window, I think that is an instance of COMMAND.COM running under Windows.

Nope, it's win.exe running from DOS7. If you have a machine to spare, create a W98 boot floppy, then install DOS from it to this new machine and reboot. You may need the rest of the \windows\command directory, and then you may just run that as any old DOS box. And one of the better versions of DOS at that. Includes himem.sys, setver, emm386.exe and other stuff, it's all available.

Likewise, boot your W98 machine command prompt only. You can run any DOS stuff while you're there. You can even type WIN and launch Windows.

>WinNT/W2K/XP does not involve DOS in the process, and WinME allegedely had removed the DOS real-mode from the boot process.

That's right, though I don't know about ME, and don't want to know :)