[Hodar]

Hate to burst your bubble, I know I hate it when I'm wrong. But, I'm sorry .... you are wrong. The OLD and obsolete versions of Windows were in fact, riding on a DOS OS.

Windows (MS-DOS Based)
Windows 1.0
Windows 2.0
Windows/286 and Windows/386 (Windows 2.1)
Windows 3.0
Windows 3.1, Windows 3.1 for Workgroups, Windows 3.11, and Windows 3.11 for Workgroups (WfW)
Windows 95 (Windows 4.0)
Windows 98 (Windows 4.1)
Windows Millennium Edition (Windows 4.9)

Windows NT
Windows NT 3.1
Windows NT 3.5
Windows NT 3.51
Windows NT 4.0 including up to Service Pack 6a
Windows 2000 (Windows NT 5.0) including up to Service Pack 4
Windows XP (Windows NT 5.1) including up to Service Pack 3
Windows Server 2003 (Windows NT 5.2) including up to Service Pack 2
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition (Windows NT 5.2) including up to Service Pack 2
Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs (Windows NT 5.1) including up to Service Pack 3
Windows Home Server (Windows NT 5.2) Windows Vista (Windows NT 6.0) including up to Service Pack 1
Windows Server 2008 (Windows NT 6.0) including up to Service Pack 1
Windows 7 (Windows NT 6.1)
Windows Server 2008 R2 (Windows NT 6.1)

Source

Everthing since WinME is based on the WinNT kernal. DOS is ran in emulation mode. You are not running on the lower OS, like you used to; MSFT saw fit to continue to support DOS and DOS commands via an eumlator (Do a search for a C:\DOS\ directory. I'd love to hear if you find it).

[razorboy]

The NT Kernel is still wrapped around DOS. They’ve never gotten away from DOS, they buried it, they hid it, but it’s still there. You don’t need to stick things in c:\dos\ to have a bunch of DOS code in the core kernel files.