You know, there were already some tools that allows you to boot to Real-mode DOS in WinME, but in fact... they are nothing but a patched Emergency Boot Disk IO.SYS, a patched COMMAND.COM and a patched REGENV32.exe. Since they use Emergency Boot Disk's IO.SYS, there aren't any other options in the startup menu when holding CTRL (or pressing F8) and it won't boot Windows automatically. And if you patch it, you'll have to kiss goodbye to Windows Me's startup logo. You'll need to load IFSHLP.SYS manually if you want to boot Windows, and to make it boot automatically you'll have to add WIN manually at the end of AUTOEXEC.BAT. The SHIFT-F8 way is simply a step-by-step confirmation that you just need to exclude the WIN command yourself. Now I'm wondering whether there can be a way that can keep all what the original IO.SYS have while inserting the features that allows Command Prompt... Besides, maybe you've heard of the mysterious "Logical Lock", which caused the disk unreadable in all Microsoft-based DOS systems, while other DOSes can still read them. I wonder if there can also be a fix of this for MS-DOS 8.00 (WinME). I haven't tried Dosfix 3. It probably does in the same way...

Why do you "need" DOS? http://www.dosbox.com/

I have a lot of good DOS utilities that I can run DOS programs flawlessly... I got a Sound Blaster 16, for example. IMO I only need to use DosBox if I'm running a computer that cannot run DOS programs by itself... as when I'm using a new PC with WinXP, etc... But whatever, DosBox can be laggy sometimes... Once I'd like to run ROM-DOS 7.10 SUV (for its native support for LFN), but neither Windows 9x/ME nor Windows 2000 (NTLDR) can coexist with it... If I SYS the primary partition NTLDR will not be loaded, and if I restore, ROM-DOS will not boot. I'm wondering if there's ever an NTLDR replacement that supports other DOSes. I got XOSL working a long time ago... but mainly it was because I'm going to run ZETA-OS or Linux alongside with Windows... I cannot run Windows 2000 individually... since wherever I install it (I installed ZETA on the primary partition of my second hard disk, and Windows 2000 on a logical partition of my second hard disk), it puts NTLDR on the FIRST hard disk, and thus, interfering with the system I've installed.