Kindred spirits! Me discovering that QuickBasic was able to liberate my proggies (as I called them for a brief stint) from the confines of the editor by compiling them to EXEs was one of the happiest moments of my young computer life.

Hacking EXPLORER.EXE and changing the Start Menu side graphic with Borland Resource Workshop was another notable one.

Love it. One fun hack that I figured out as a kid was that while you couldn't get rid of the mouse in Win9x - you could deliberately create a completely transparent "CUR" file.

Watching an adult try to navigate in Windows with an invisible mouse was like the digital equivalent of using a dowsing rod to find water.