>So ample facilities were created to help the user out, such as "Safe Mode" , fallback drivers, and a graphics driver interface that disables itself if it crashes too many times (yes really).
Pretty sure most of this was already in place with Windows 95; I know Safe Mode definitely was along with a very basic VGA driver that could drive any video card in the world.
User space drivers that could restart without kernel panicking didn't exist until Windows Vista (well, on the home user side of Windows).
Fallback drivers were never a thing on Win9x, you would have to go into safe mode to uninstall broken drivers that wouldn't allow a boot (typically graphics drivers); or manually uninstall/replace them otherwise.
> Fallback drivers existed, because how else would Safe Mode drive the video card so you can see something to operate the borked computer?
If you use "fallback" in a colloquial sense, yes the VESA/VGA driver that Windows "fell-back" on was a fallback driver.
Fallback Drivers (proper noun) is a distinct concept of last functional or alternative drivers that Windows would use instead, if the primary one failed. They fell in-between Windows' generic drivers and your current installed one.
The latter is what is being referred to in this conversation.
I'm not aware of "primary" drivers if that's a thing. I know that Safe Mode always falls back to the drivers Windows has by default because that's the whole point of Safe Mode.
Been using Windows since 3.1, my dude. I know Windows like the back of my hands.
You can have multiple drivers for a device installed, but Windows will usually get very confused and/or the drivers will get very confused with themselves and things will get very janky very quickly.
It's really not worth the pain and hilarity compared to just KISS'ing with one driver and nuking and installing as desired. DDU was invented for a reason.
Anyway, Windows in Safe Mode will always fall back to its own default store of drivers. You can explicitly enable an exception for NICs, but otherwise no third-party drivers are loaded because the entire point of Safe Mode is to get Windows to boot using known-good, Microsoft-guaranteed drivers.
Pretty sure most of this was already in place with Windows 95; I know Safe Mode definitely was along with a very basic VGA driver that could drive any video card in the world.