Underneath the hood Windows ME is just Windows 4.90 running on top of MS-DOS 8.00. The above screen shot shows the system monitor indicating that two virtual DOS machines are open even though only one DOS box is open. Config.sys is automatically erased at boot up to prevent DOS drivers from loading. You can still run DOS applications in a DOS box exactly the same as 95 and 98. The Windows ME emergency boot disk still boots to real mode DOS and programs can be run from there.
Windows now crashes differently.
This seems more like the way Windows 3.0 would crash.