While the early core win32 parts are still fine, much COM based stuff will probably be a pain in the future. It's not direct breakage per-se (API's were genera

While the early core win32 parts are still fine, much COM based stuff will probably be a pain in the future. It's not direct breakage per-se (API's were generated from definition files and there was an encouragement to build new API versions when breaking API's), the issue will be that many third party things were to be manually installed from more or less obscure sources. Your Office install probably introduced a bunch of COM objects. Third party software that depended on those objects might not handle them being missing. I think I took some DOS-like shortcuts with some of my early DirectDraw (DirectX 3 level?) code, afaik it doesn't work in fullscreen past Windows Vista but _luckily_ I provided a "slow" windowed GDI fallback so the software still kinda runs at least.