PJSim

If you can make it work, I say use an OS for the joy of it. Personally, I have both Windows 7 and 10 on the same machine, and I usually stay on 7 unless there's something I need to do that requires or would perform significantly better on 10 - especially since all the desktop programs I run also work on 7, including my web browser (Firefox), which is arguably the most important part of an OS in this day and age. I agree with you on Windows 10, everything is just so flat, bland, and gray... so I just spend most of my time on 7 since it just makes me feel better. But I think once 7 goes the way of XP/Vista and you basically don't have any modern programs compatible and you need to start using old/user-made stuff and do all these little hacky workarounds to get things to run, then I'd probably push more towards using 10 for important stuff, but maybe leaving 7 around for more casual things when you feel like it.

Some people have uploaded versions on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/search.php?query=steam xp, so you can try one of those out. The first three seem to be the relevant ones. If none of them work or they stop working, you can always use SteamCMD instead.

Thanks for providing an alternative, it looks like it should work well enough for me. I don't know how I never found this earlier. I tried doing a profile of WinCollab.exe on both 7 and Vista. I personally couldn't find any errors that really stood out to me, so I'm kind of stuck now - on 7 it references dlls like "KERNEL32.DLL" and "KERNELBASE.DLL" that Vista doesn't even use at all, and it just seems to end kinda peacefully without some major error I can identify. I did notice that Meeting Space has some sort of tie to the "People Near Me" (p2phost.exe) program, so that could add an entirely different layer to the situation. All in all I think the issue is with the program, not its dependencies - there's probably something in its code that checks for a specific product key or version of Windows, and I don't know how to change any of that, so I might just step down for now if that's the case. All the stuff about porting on the 2000/9x forums seems more tailored to those specific operating systems and dlls and stuff as well, so I wasn't able to find any help there (maybe I didn't dig hard enough?). I'm going to provide the profiles I did on WinCollab on 7, Vista, and the P2PHOST thing that DW switched to after WC on Vista. If anybody wants to take it from here or give some advice, go ahead. (I think I might've messed up the settings on one of the profiles, so if you need me to redo them I can.) WinCollabProfiles.zip

Recently I've tried to port Windows Meeting Space over to Windows 7, but it's not working. I've gotten interested in the program since I like how it's free, p2p, has a bunch of features and stuff to go with messaging, and doesn't have a file sharing size limit (at least im pretty sure, ngl i haven't gotten to use it too much but if it's anything like NetMeeting, count me in). I just thought it'd be cool if I could run it on my 7 partition and maybe give it to some of my friends so we could get past the "le epic gamer" Discord with it's pitiful 8 MB file sharing size and crappy snapchat-ripoff Skype. So basically, to make a long story short, I copied over the x86 & x64 Program Files for it ("Windows Collaboration"), got the p2pcollab.dll stuff from sys32 and sysWOW, as well as went through the program with Dependency Walker and Process Monitor to basically hack together a bunch of needed dlls from my PC and stuff... But: nothing. Every time I open the program it just immediately closes. Not crashes - just closes. Then I realized that it's probably not so much an issue with dlls and things (since a newer version of Windows would obviously have everything that Vista has), but probably more along the lines of Windows product activation or something. So I guess this post is more of a plea - how the hell do people hack programs like these to make them work on newer versions of Windows? I mean, people have already ported over all the games from Vista/7 to 8/10, so it's not like it's impossible, but there really doesn't seem to be ANY starting point/tutorial anywhere to do something like that - at least, not open in the public. Something's telling me there's probably a reason for that though - and I'm sure the solution probably has something to do with some complicated hex editing or etc. It's not the end of the world if this never gets resolved, but I just think it'd be really cool to have this program on 7/10. If anybody can help, say somethin.

https://msfn.org/board/topic/177702-steam-for-xp-in-2019/?do=findComment&comment=1158592 Huh, that reminds me lf that time MS said they’d stop supporting MSE after eos but it still worked for a while.... maybe it’s a situation like that. Or maybe they’re just going to leave xp users on this one version forever until it eventually just stops working or something. It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

Just for posterity's sake, anybody think it's possible to somehow package this still-XP compatible Steam version and upload it somewhere? I mean it might not necessarily be worth it since Steam might block the client, and more and more games aren't going to be supporting XP & etc... but then again, there are still those XP compatible games on the store (and maybe more lightweight games could support XP in the future), so I feel like it might be useful to others in the future if we can somehow get this older version contained??? I don't know, just a thought.