Earlier this week, Microsoft made available for download Virtual PC 2007 Release Candidate 1. RC1 contains a set of new features from added PXE Boot support to Virtual Networking on wireless adapters, but also the release has fixed some general issues affecting previous builds. Virtual PC 2007 Release Candidate (32-bit) build 6.0.142, and Virtual PC 2007 Release Candidate (64-bit) build 6.0.142 also introduced support for Windows Vista as both the ghost and the guest operating system.

As I have said in a precedent article, the Virtual Machine Additions are an integer part of Virtual PC 2007. In this context, the VM Additions fail to lead on Windows 95.

Ben Armstrong, a Program manager on the Virtual machine team explained why. First off, the loading failure is generated by the fact that Windows 95 is no longer among the operating systems supported by Virtual PC 2007.

The confusion was generated by the fact that Virtual PC 2007 does run on Windows 95. Armstrong explained that, despite this, Virtual PC 2007 has not been tested on Windows 95 and Microsoft will not provide support for customers running Virtual PC 2007 on Windows 95. Armstrong used as argument the fact that Microsoft has stopped support for the operating system itself in order to explain Microsoft's decision not to include Windows 95 in the list of operating systems supported by Virtual PC 2007. "For the Windows Virtual Machine Additions installer we use a WiX based installer that is built with Visual Studio. With the latest version of Visual Studio we are no longer able to build and install and it can run on Windows 95", Armstrong explained.

However, he did present a workaround: "So what does all this mean if you want to run Windows 95 on Virtual PC 2007? The first thing to know is that it will still run, just without Virtual Machine Additions. The next thing to know is that if you take the Virtual Machine Additions from Virtual PC 2004 and install them on Windows 95 under Virtual PC 2007, it should work. Keep in mind that this is all unsupported."