Is there anyway of getting the old shell onto Windows XP or Server 2003? I would like it so when I minimize a window it will become an icon. Thanks!

Program Manager you say? Lose the IE shell and become secure with Program Manager!

NT5 what has this got to do with W3 ???
they are ten years apart..........

Well, people who know a lot about 3.x would know a lot about its fetaures, no? So, posting a question abotu a 3.x interface on diffrent windows platforms would know about this. So, a question like this would be best geared towards the 3.x boards ;-)

Program Manager you say? Lose the IE shell and become secure with Program Manager!

Window 3 is a GUI on top of MS DOS O/S, NT is
based on OS/2 which is a intregrated O/S
therefore it would take a developer who
understands NT to be able to use W3 GUI.

This is the same as asking Virtual PC run
on Windows XP questions here, no relevence.

YOUR O/S IS THE NT FAMILY AND THESE FORUMS HAVE SEPERATE
O/S FORUMS FOR THEIR RELATED QUESTIONS

TRY THE MAC FORUM???

Yeah, "Sabrina" (or is it "Pikachu"?) that's pretty flawed thinking, to say the least.

Thank you for further diluting the ever thinning gruel that this particular forum has become. By comparison, the DOS forum is a veritable beehive of activity (and WinME seems populated by scholars)

Questions even remotely concerned with Win3x here are rare indeed - most of those turn out to be DOS or hardware problems, or else could be answered in 5 seconds using Google.

Give me ambiguity or give me something else

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Progman is still included with Xp & WinS2k3 so try running Program from the run box. On some machines this will open Progman and on others it will open an explorer window. I don't know why it acts this way but if it opens progman your good to go. You just need to change one registy key to set progman as your shell.

To change the shell to progman open regedit and navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
change explorer.exe to progman.exe then reboot. You should now have WinNT looking more like Win3 :)

Hope this helps,
Sandman

Bear in mind as you do this that XP may not have winfile.exe (File Manager) included, although progman.exe does exist, oddly enough. You will want to copy winfile.exe and winfile.hlp from a previous version of NT (preferably NT 4, maybe 3.51) if you want a functioning File Manager capable of handling long file names. I do NOT recommend using File Manager from Windows 3.x / 9x as they do not natively handle long file names (and could cause other issues!)

Thanks all for your help! Yes sandman, I've changed the dumb explorer into progman.exe, but the interesting thing is SP2 or Server 2k3 had Progman.exe disabled. I've did some reserach, but the only thing I got was a topic of a conference with the SP2 team and somebody asked to why they done this. They only said "This was a last minute change, when you double click on it this is suppost to happen". Well, with such an odd answer, this leaves you in the dust.

Glitchman I do have the file manager from NT4. You would need to obtain NT SP6a and extract the files within it. There is the offical file manager .exe which runs very smoothly.

But the only thing to make this 3.11 interface complete is the dang features where you minimize a window and it would turn into an icon.. X-( Also, when you explore for files within program, they come up with the more recent explorer when fidning a file.

Anywho, thanks are for the little chat and if you guys have any info about these issues please send me a eMail ro reply. Thanks!

Program Manager you say? Lose the IE shell and become secure with Program Manager!

Apart from the blathering about Sabrina going somewhere else this has been an interesting thread. Also it's seems some expect google to reveal all. I'd be interested if you manage to get minimixed proggies as icons. Maybe it's as just a simple matter of replacing a DLL. your thoughts?

Have yoy ever tried to replace USER.EXE and USER32.DLL with WinNT 3.51 SP1 ones? it should do the trick. If some DLLs start complaining after this replace them too (the most likely to do such a thing is SHELL32.DLL, i think).
BACKUP FIRST!!!
* note: some dlls needs to be registered after been replaced (user32.dll don't, at least when i replaced my win98 with a winME one). If this is the case. Enter "regsvr32 file.dll" in the safe mode command prompt, replacing file.dll with the dll name, and then rebooting.