I decided to put one of those Mini XP installations on an 8 year old computer, as a replacement for Windows 98SE. It actually works quite well. The old OS had 8 years of gunk, upgrades, and features I never used in 8 years. The new one had a few problems of missing components, and unsupported hardware, which is actually a decent thing, because it likely doesn't have a lot of stuff that would kill usability on an 8 year old comp, and the missing hardware isn't terribly missed, just disabled in the hardware profile. One learns a good deal about what they use when they have to manually add it. I used the normal Windows XP .INF folder to get all the components installed, and used the filenames it wanted to search for the drivers I needed. A copy of the I386 folder will also likely be required for the odd driver. The main issue I found I had was installing the things related to the error message "(some program) is not a valid win32 application" In my case, this happened both for old DOS applications and Win16 applications. It was inevitable that I'd want this fixed, as I use quite a few old apps, whether it's playing some ancient DOS games, or playing Castle of the Winds. I also have some old Visual Basic 6 programs, and a VB6 compiler which won't install without a working Windows on Windows (WoW) setup. These instructions should let you either install or repair this feature. Microsoft also shouldn't have a problem because I refuse to distribute the required files, and instead demand that you use an I386 directory, or some other means to get the files themselves. Just unzip the file to a folder, run GetFiles.bat to make it try to write the needed files to the I386_WoW folder, then InstallFiles.bat will read out of that folder and try to put the 29 files into the system folder. If it asks you to overwrite files, choose No if adding to a minimalized installation, Yes if repairing a previously working system.DOS_Win16_WoW_Install.zip
Another registry entry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WOW shows the following entry: KnownDLLs (String Value, REG_SZ) comm.drv commdlg.dll ctl3dv2.dll ddeml.dll keyboard.drv lanman.drv mmsystem.dll mouse.drv netapi.dll olecli.dll olesvr.dll pmspl.dll shell.dll sound.drv system.drv toolhelp.dll vga.drv wfwnet.drv win87em.dll winoldap.mod winsock.dll winspool.exe wowdeb.exe timer.drv rasapi16.dll compobj.dll storage.dll ole2.dll ole2disp.dll ole2nls.dll typelib.dll msvideo.dll avifile.dll msacm.dll mciavi.drv mciseq.drv mciwave.drv progman.exe avicap.dll mapi.dll This is that list, seperated: comm.drv commdlg.dll ctl3dv2.dll ddeml.dll keyboard.drv lanman.drv mmsystem.dll mouse.drv netapi.dll olecli.dll olesvr.dll pmspl.dll shell.dll sound.drv system.drv toolhelp.dll vga.drv wfwnet.drv win87em.dll winoldap.mod winsock.dll winspool.exe wowdeb.exe timer.drv rasapi16.dll compobj.dll storage.dll ole2.dll ole2disp.dll ole2nls.dll typelib.dll msvideo.dll avifile.dll msacm.dll mciavi.drv mciseq.drv mciwave.drv progman.exe avicap.dll mapi.dll