[datenarsch]

> And unless you were writing drivers, that major OS version wasn't going to break anything.

Just a minor nitpick, but the NT device driver API has in fact stayed largely the same since Windows 2000 and in comparison to the various technologies that came and went in userland.

[com2kid]

Sound and display drivers.

And then MS got pissed at Creative for having drivers so bad that crashes from Creative sound card drivers accounted for a non-trivial % of all Windows crashes. The result was MS changing the entire Windows audio stack and eliminating Creatives most lucrative product line.

But apart from that, not many changes.:)

WDDM was a huge one though.