This is somewhat off-topic, but...

I remember when NT 4.0 came out how many people claimed it was so much
more stable as a workstation and development platform than Windows 95
was.  Lots of people I respect switched to it and reported vast
improvements.

I switched from 95 to NT over a year ago after Windows 95 melted down
completely on me after getting more and more unstable over time.  NT
was wonderfully stable in comparison.

Now I've been running NT about as long as I had been running Win 95 when
it started becoming unstable, and I'm starting to have all the same sort
of problems on NT that I had on Windows 95.

I'm having to reboot once or twice a day due to the networking system
getting clogged up to the point that no data will transfer anymore,
running FrameMaker results in window controls and display elements being
drawn incorrectly until reboot, etc., etc.

I'm beginning to feel that much of the perceived superiority of NT was due
simply to the fact that upgrading to it forced most people to essentially
do a clean install, which resulted in a clean and stable environment, and
that over time all the assorted software that gets installed onto the
machine (and possibly later incompletely deinstalled) leaves you with the
same kind of flaky patchwork operating system environment as Windows 95,
with all the problems attendant there to.

Certainly NT is much better in many areas than 95, but when it comes down
to whether it is fundamentally more robust and stable when used in a
real-life developer workstation environment, I'm not sure it's really any
better than 95 was.  Install programs still vomit files all over the disk,
happily replacing whatever critical shared DLL files that they feel like,
and none of NT's security or kernel features seem to be used to prevent
applications from doing whatever their developers felt like to your system.

So, I'm interested in whether this is just me or not.  How are other people
finding the reliability of NT as a *workstation* platform over time?

G.