For those of you that don't know, there's a thing called ReactOS. It's a 
free operating system which is supposed to be binary-compatible with 
Microsoft Windows XP. (Despite the small and obvious problem that this 
_should_ be 100% illegal.)

Well anyway, the CD image is only about 50 MB, so I downloaded it and 
had a go at running it.

First of all, I'm using versio 0.3.11, and it's buggy as hell. Windows 
randomly vanish into thin air, programs lock up, and at one point I 
managed to make the desktop and task bar vanish, leaving me with just 
the backdrop image. You *can* do stuff with it, but it's very unreliable.

Aside from that... it looks almost *scarily* like Windows XP. Or maybe 
NT4, I'm not sure. Some of it is quite different, some is very similar. 
There's quite big chunks of stuff missing of course. (E.g., the event 
viewer... doesn't.) I tried to map a network drive and discovered that 
the command isn't implemented. That kind of thing.

Then again, I had a go at running a few *real* Windows programs, and 
they do in fact run, which is already fantastically unlikely. Obviously 
all the programs I tried crashed almost instantly, but almost all of 
them did run briefly before dying. That alone ought to be impossible, 
but somehow they've managed it.

Of course, the only things I happen to have ISO images for are big, 
complex programs with intricate installation routines - exactly the kind 
of thing you'd expect to not work. Since I can't get network access to 
work right, I can't easily try anything else. Pitty, it would be 
interesting to see whether any of the stuff I've written works...

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