Hi, how about using Novell DOS 7?
In my tests, it was about 13KB smaller than MS-DOS 6.22.

Then there's also a Netroom 3 (ad) and Helix Multimedia Cloaking (wiki).
Netroom runs a VM (!) to "outsource" parts of DOS, while Cloaking does put some larger drivers (Mouse, SmartDrive, MSCDEX) beyond 1MB (using 1KB stubs).

The "trick" in the link wasn't bad, but also not very ingenious.
It's the old "lets cramb everything in the UMA" trick.
The creative part is using UMBPCI/DOSMAX to upload DOS and Himem.sys into UMBs right from the start.
It also includes monochrome area, which also MemMaker would offer to users.
4DOS is used as a replacement to command.com, which is more flexible and advanced.

The downside is, however, that no EMS page frame/no EMS is available.
Programs like SmartDrive or MSCDEX have support for it, though.
(The cloaked versions, too, but they won't need it because of cloaking technology)

I did pretty good using that as an example, But I have a lot more upper memory at 100k free, I'm trying to keep it as original as possible though, I did the monochrome trick, and reclaimed memory areas, tried different shells and memory managers, and the trick to get 722k, but it eats my video memory, need an external graphic card for that one. I'm at the end, I can just see that with all the bloat of the original post, there was only 9k for the dos system memory. Why is mine stuck at 10k and above with a much cleaner system. I was thinking about the old routines like tape data and floppy functions , whatever legacy stuff in the kernel can it be unloaded somehow ? Does Novell Dos work well for older Dos games ? This machine runs games native from 1981 to about 1998 , If Novel does a better job I would consider giving it a try.

Why are there now three threads?
How many do you need to discuss this?
MS-DOS 6.22 Memory Optimizations (Conventional free: 643.600 (629K))
4DOS frustration

Separate issues, just trying to put them where they seem to go, shaving parts of a Dos kernel or using a kacked reduced kernel seems pretty random , so I stuck it in the random section