On Vista, conhost.also ran in user context and console windows were themed, on XP they was not. I believe that conhost.exe was introduced in Vista together with

On Vista, conhost.also ran in user context and console windows were themed, on XP they was not. I believe that conhost.exe was introduced in Vista together with new desktop separation mechanism and on earlier version all the console window logic was internal to csrss (which in original NT design was essentially display server and window manager and placing console emulation in there makes some kind of sense given the NT's model of that).