Another issue which ea has brought up is that NT is somehow to "connected" to Win32. I beg to differ. I've spent a week working on a sample native application. It currently can display running processes, drivers, create a new process and create/delete/list files. Here are some screenshots:
http://members.tripod.com/WinAlOS/rtlcli.png http://members.tripod.com/WinAlOS/rtlcli2.png http://members.tripod.com/WinAlOS/rtlcli3.png
Note that there is no CSR, no win32k.sys loaded. NT is running in its rawest form. You need less then 16MB of memory (notice that the processes are using <1MB, the rest is up to the drivers, which you can disable) and about the same amount of diskspace. This works perfectly in Windows 2003 without any need to "separate win32".
Highly interesting. I'm just fascinated from that native app or the screenshots and what they show.
And many many quetions arise in my brain.
One is: Why are you talking so much of 2k3 in the latest time? Is there some real big design change occoured? Can it live without csrss while priror versions couln't? That would be courious to me because MS pollutes and webs more and more together but separating each part cleanly.