My suspicion is you're right. Mostly based on Raymond's blog on the role of DOS in Windows 95[1]. Where people using weird drivers and other things that got in

My suspicion is you're right. Mostly based on Raymond's blog on the role of DOS in Windows 95[1]. Where people using weird drivers and other things that got in the way of 32bit disk access could massively slow down the system. It's plausible that one extender was being "nice" and using your native drivers or at least trying to be compatible whereas another just went "Nah that crap is slow" and just went for it with a native direct driver and was thus massively faster. [1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24063 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24...