>The ability to choose icons that are more than 30 years old is still here, with the inclusion of the very important and absolutely critical to the good function of the OS moricons.dll
I will happily bet there are programs out there that would crash and burn horrifically without moricons.dll.
I will bet that almost* no one at Microsoft (*well maybe Raymond Chen) knows that it's there and what it does, they are too busy piling up (not-so)shiny new things.
I imagine that Raymond's day at the office is basically him going from room to room saying hello and telling people stuff that everyone else forgot. Then he has lunch with someone else of the old guard, pops into random meetings to unblock the discussion and finally spends the last hour of the day writing another blogpost for TONT.
Windows is the practical behemoth that it is /because/ of Microsoft's refusal to leave old programs to rot. We use Windows so we can run the programs we want, and Microsoft will apparently move the Earth itself to make that happen.
I don't think moricons.dll is actively used by Window itself anywhere? It's a resource DLL you can reference to use icons from in your own program shortcuts and similar. It doesn't provide an API as such. It's more like a collection of known graphics files being shipped as part of Windows.
I will happily bet there are programs out there that would crash and burn horrifically without moricons.dll.