[ygra]

It wasn't really that closely tied, if I remember. It simply used Terminal Services to run a single application on the server. You've long been able to open local documents with remote applications, and have the general experience very close to a local application.

[soundwave106]

Windows Virtual PC, the core of the technology, is more akin to VMWare, VirtualBox. The "Windows XP Mode" part of the equation was that Microsoft offered a pre-installed image of Windows XP.

While the virtual environment integrated somewhat with the base (eg audio, printers, some networking shares and hard drives), it still is a separate window running a separate virtualized OS. I'm not sure I would call that too tightly integrated.

Nonetheless I personally found it handy nonetheless to run the occasional very old 16-bit application.

[digi_owl]

Was sad when I found out they dumped it for Win8 and newer...