Right, and I believe that all stems from 90s-era decisions to run so much through the kernel to improve speed. In return for decent performance out of that Pentium 300 we had to deal with far more BSODs than we do now. I think they've slowly been returning the OS to a modular system for stability, with faster hardware more than making up for the relative loss in speed.
The problem is how tightly bound those optimizations were. They could have built a totally new one, but like many OS Windows has to worry about backwards compatibility. So legacy stuff gets left in, a LOT of it.
The Jedi Master
The anteater is wearing the bagel because he's a reindeer princess. -- my 4 yr old daughter
