Depends which flavor of windows. Some are NT based, not all. NT4.0 was actually one of the better things that they put out. Unfortunately, you need the hard to find SP6 in order to get it to work with USB ports. SCSI drives ran well under that system. It's offspring,2000 was not bad for a lot of the things that I do, but the parallel released ME was total trash. 2000 was fairly straightforward offspring of NT, ME was very much a departure.
You really don’t know what you are talking about. I’ve been writing drivers since Detroit (OSR2.1) where a USB stack was hacked into Windows 95.
The Win 32 driver model was based on the NT architecture. Looks at the IRP structure. WDM has been evolving with every release of Windows.
All versions of Windows from Win2K and on are all based on WDM and therefore NT. Windows 98 (one of the most successful OSes for many years) were partly in vxd land and partly in WDM.