in my experience:

win95 was an unstable OS but had a stable shell (explorer)
but whenever litestep died, upon focusing of the desktop
it would pop up taskman.exe
(so you could launch something in the manner you describe)

win98 had an unstable explorer and a stable OS
but whenever litestep died, you'd be left with whatever other apps if any, so you could respawn litestep.

[winME only saw a few boots (with uptime of minutes when it complete froze) before I reformatted and ridded that PoS.]

win2k/winXP have taskmgr.exe always bound to ctrl+shift+esc though, that's always a big relief.