[jodrellblank]

I'm going to guess, if they're in use you wont be allowed to delete them, and then you'd be in a similar situation - things like notepad would be missing, various programs wont start due to missing dependencies.

In fact, we can see from Youtube:

Ubuntu: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4fzInlyYQo

Windows XP: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aSo8-VDS8E

XP appears to hold up slightly better - it doesn't ruin the fonts, and it pops up a System File Protection dialog indicating it has noticed the broken system files and asking for an install CD to recover them from.

[djacobs]

My overall point is that Windows (in my experience) breaks at the slightest registry change or missing DLL or config file. Linux/Unix try to be as loosely coupled as possible, which means you can still run your in-memory gnuemacs (as in the article) even when your /bin directory (presumably with supporting binaries for emacs) gets wiped out.

That kind of design takes a lot of thought and, as far as I know, doesn't hold true in DOS/Windows.