It wasn't any better for Windows 98 with IE bundled in the shell, and audio parsing functions right in the kernel. Up to the point tons of people chose to reve

It wasn't any better for Windows 98 with IE bundled in the shell, and audio parsing functions right in the kernel. Up to the point tons of people chose to revert W98's shell to the Win95 one, having a good speed boost on some PI-PII machnes. VB6 was a good idea as a RAD tool; but, as TCL 7.x (and the older 8.x releases), the performance wasn't fast enough until some Pentium 3/Pentium 4 for 'big' software. Not an issue for a boring company program or the 234000000nth shareware crossword puzzle software for PC magazines or sites as Softonic. Or some whatever catalog hooking up some Excel/Access libraries, or nice in-sormware forms borrowed from IE DLL to create zillions of similar shovelware. That kind of niche software was everywhere. Ditto with some simple games written in VB; but the native ones outperformed VB ones with ease. And, yes, you could call native DDL's, but most amateur programmers didn't do that.