Comment by bux93

Without open shell, you can fairly easily ignore the start menu by just starting to type after you press the win-button; it sanely defaults to search. Then you just set the main taskbar to align to the left and remove the search bar and whatever stuff they shove in there from it.

Windows 2000 was the GOAT, it looked perfectly OK, had NT underpinnings, was stable and had pretty good hardware support. You could probably run it today if you don't play games or have a non-postscript/HPL printer.