There were third party addons that did some pretty crazy things. I don't know if animations were among them, but I do remember at least one that would completely retheme windows with different shapes and layouts, Windowblinds I think it was called.
Thanks for refreshing my memory. Those were pretty cool programs back then.
I definetly remember Windowsblinds too (and geez, it seems they're still around ...).
I was into LiteStep, which basically was a shell replacement for explorer.exe.
I'm also reminded how trivially easy it was to configure Win9x to use a different shell: you'd just edit system.ini under [boot] to say shell=litestep.exe and you were done.
> I'm also reminded how trivially easy it was to configure Win9x to use a different shell: you'd just edit system.ini under [boot] to say shell=litestep.exe and you were done.
Fun fact, Win98 still had progman.exe installed (from win 3.1 and earlier). I had to switch to it in system.ini one day when something in explorer got corrupted and the normal UI wouldn't load.
You could do that trick even in windows 3.11. I remember using central point desktop for a while: 3d look, virtual desktops, advanced file manager and a bunch of other goodies in the 3.x era.
Litestep was fun, especially for those of us that couldn't get away with installing Linux on the family computer.
I also used eFX, which was a free Windowblinds competitor that made it super easy to make skins, and released a ton of garish and ugly ones back in the day.
