http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58333
--- Comment #3 from Ken Sharp imwellcushtymelike@gmail.com --- I tried spamming my environment with a tonne of large variables and Windows 3.1 wouldn't even start. There's probably a better way to do that then filling the MSDOS environment, but I don't know how.
Windows NT 4.0 (SP1 and SP6a) allowed Freelance to start without issue, despite my environment being over 1 MB. So it's doing *something* to allow Freelance to start (under NTVDM), which might simply be using a clean environment. I'm not aware of any useful tools to let me know but I could dump the memory if need be. It takes so long to fill the memory that I'd have to come back to that if it's useful.
But I was, of course, running these tests under a VM, and with a 32-bit OS. As MS decided to simply drop 16-bit support for 64-bit Windows there's no real like-for-like comparison.