Sad to see little mentions of the Internet Archive here :,(

It’s what they made to replace conhost.exe, even open source so actually pretty cool considering it’s M$.

This is still the case for many South Korean shits, tho these days you can also use a (Googled) Android or iOS device with some shitty app.

Explorer7 is decent, allows the Win7 explorer to be used on Win8/10/11. https://github.com/world-windows-federation/explorer7

For an actual custom shell there’s xoblite https://xoblite.net/shell/ tho I haven’t used it personally. I just use bbZero https://archive.org/details/bbZero_install_1.18.0-rc6_mojmir, this still works on Win10 though UWP stuff are broken.

it wouldn’t prevent all vulnerabilities so theoretically you can still be pwned but practically that’s going to work for most cases imo. I’ve done this in the past, block everything except for some proxy port then configure the browser to use that proxy, and use nuTensor/uBlock Origin on the browser to only allow essential things.

If you’re talking about Windows 10, install Win10 Enterprise IoT LTSC 21H2 and disable all the telemetry craps. That gives you a clean(?) Windows setup with support until 2032.