So you stick to vendor-supplied "vi" binaries as well? The Windows NT problem is this: it's very fussy about whence and how it's booted, and there's therefore

So you stick to vendor-supplied "vi" binaries as well? The Windows NT problem is this: it's very fussy about whence and how it's booted, and there's therefore never been an easy, obvious way to set up a decent, customizable recovery environment on external media (including, naturally, one's favorite editor(s)). Contrast with, say, OS X, where, in a pinch, you can even run suitably linked GUI versions of Vim and Emacs directly from a Time Machine backup in the recovery environment.