I call bullshit on your call. Don’t you remember active desktop? That was as bloated as anything and crashed all the time. People having a IE crash screen as their wallpaper and being clueless as to how to get rid of it, was hilarious.
To be fair, that wasn't 'on' by default, and it wasn't necessarily bloatware, as it's a small activex module/component. It's actually fairly light with how well it works from a code-base perspective! but, it's akin to malware more than anything since it's inception.