If you want a bare-bones OS you can build from the ground up with the better third-party tools available today while retaining virtually full backwards compatibility with 9x-era software, I'd say POSReady 2009's what you're looking for, and as a former WinFLP user, I tell you I've never looked back …

I have seen threads where someone backported newer intel chipset drivers to windows 7 on msfn.org, but the download links are dead and I cannot locate the threads. Does anyone have these drivers? My computer is a Dell with an Intel CM246 chipset with an 8th generation Intel Core i7.