does anyone remember the windows os that had a menu before the desktop?

The first Windows version I believe was Windows 3.1 which was just a GUI (graphical user interface) on top of MS DOS. While you could have more than one window open, it was really a single task operating system, so only one window would actually be active at a time. I don't recall if it actually went into a menu first to choose whether to use DOS programs or Windows, but maybe it depends upon how the autoexec.bat file was configured.

Win 3.1 did not originally include networking (you had to download tcp/ip from ftp.microsoft.com). It did not even have dial up networking (had to use trumpet winsock from Australia) and did not include a web browser. Netscape was king of the web browsers then and what later became Internet Explorer was still Mosaic beta being developed by college students at UIUC.

That is when I got into Linux which had native networking and multitasking before Windows ever did. But that was partly because my local ISP gave us a shell account in SunOS (Unix) and apache web space and it was much easier to write CGI scripts in Linux and simply upload them than to develop them in Windows and have to make changes in paths and modules for Unix. 20+ years later Linux is still my OS of choice (posted this reply using Firefox in Linux).

If you're harking back to the Windows 95/98 era, possibly it was a simple MS-DOS menu implemented in the config.sys file, or something similar in autoexec.bat.  These were even more common pre-Windows.

It isn't a standard Windows feature. It's either extra software which came with your computer, or you were running a pirated Windows which included it. Pirated software can contain any virus so you shouldn't use it.

It was called DOS. It was my first Second Operating System.

yes