you hit the nail right on the thumb.
FreeDOS claims to emulate MSDOS interrupts perfectly, however the official line is that it cannot run MSWindows as it is a special case. However they claim tht some people have got windows runnign on freedos, so i wanted to try it out.
I just wanted an old stylee fat16/12 only DOS OS to play with, i already have mandrake 8.2 and winME so, you know, winME is shit at DOS stuff, and i wanted to try and run all my DOS programs (mostly games) on a free, and possibly open source OS, plus FreeDOS has ported compilers, libraries and so on from unix type open source projects too, so theoretically it would be a lot better than msdos IF IT WORKED!!!