Yes, in fact win 95 and 98 were both based on the windows 3.1 kernal and this was so ripe with problems that 95 and 98 tried to fix by patching on updates. The NT kernal is far more stable.
No idea what Vista is based on but I have a policy of not buying new OSs until they have been out for a while so that they can sort out many of the bugs![]()