There was much marketing directed at the fact that as of Windows 95, applications developed with the 32-bit API onwards would benefit from preemptive multitaski

There was much marketing directed at the fact that as of Windows 95, applications developed with the 32-bit API onwards would benefit from preemptive multitasking. Legacy 16-bit applications coexisted in some kind of virtual machine (maybe it was called Windows On Windows, WOW for short, or maybe that was an NT thing) but they could accidentally trip each other up and bring each other down, but in theory the system and the 32-bit apps were safe. So yes, the text in the article is pretty confusing and misleading. I exited Windows in the XP SP1 days (2003) and by then most of the mishaps happened due to third-party drivers.