On Sun, 11 Feb 2001, Rob Landley wrote:
I don't personally use windows, but I have a lot of friends who do. I just showed a friend 98lite.net (which has apparently gone commercial in the last year or two; I was actually looking for the list of instructions the used to have on how to replace the 98 I.E. based explorer with the 95 filesystem only explorer and delete I.E. from the system).
Their free download can do this if you wish. There's also a simple .INF file which removes the browser only.
Unfortunately, the 95 explorer, being MS intellectual property, can't be included with 98lite, they have to have a copy of 95 (pre OSR 2.5) lying around. I vaguely remembered this list discussing cloning the filesystem explorer months and months back, so my next thought was to wander over to winehq and see if you guys had cloned the filesystem explorer in such a way it could potentially be cleaned up and used to browse the filesystem so I.E. can be deleted. I didn't find one here, so I'm guessing the outcome of said discussion was "no, we aren't going to do that", but it seemed to be a question worth asking anyway.
You could try downloading Windows 95 Service Pack 1: that should have a copy of explorer.exe etc. in :-)
So: has anybody simply cloned the 95 explorer yet? Would the clone run under windows itself? How deeply does it have its tentacles into the guts of the rest of the system? Where would I go to look for such a thing?
IIRC, Explorer digs itself in pretty deeply, with various undocumented calls and hooks into the OS. Should still be possible to clone/replace, if you wanted...
James.