&quot;DLL hell&quot; doesn&#x27;t have anything to do with the built-in GUI API calls.  The part of the API that pertains to the GUI is built-in, standard, and has been since the 90&#x27;s.  I can take an application written today and run it on Windows XP-10 and it will work as long as I take care to not use any API calls that are specific to later versions of Windows (very few for most apps).<p>If you want to criticize the GUI aspect of Windows, you should target the lack of any standard <i>modern</i> GUI API calls that don&#x27;t involve using Direct2D or GDI+ (by modern, I mean full support for transparency and anti-aliasing, among other things).  The old API, plain GDI, was standard and well-understood, whereas the newer improvements are completely different types of layers built on top of GDI.  <i>That&#x27;s</i> the real mess.